I'll be honest, I had to read that a few times to really understand the thought process behind it, but that's a really interesting, and entirely plausible classification... I need to do more research.
(We're talking about THIS MESSAGE, in case Slashdot's moderators have completely hidden it from view) Thanks kindly for reading it. I feel like I'm in a schoolyard surrounded by bullies. For one thing, you cannot mention sheep these days without jabbing emotional buttons and hasty readers think you are trying to be insulting and lobbing -1 Flamebait epithets at people. Sheep as in counting sheep. We're talking about ordinal numbers, counting sheep. I'm not trying to insult anyone! Get it? Good. Baaaah.
Numerical prime-ness also crops up in dimension count. We directly perceive the existence of a 'stable' 3-dimensional space. The most elaborate universe model that has yet been constructed on a backboard is M-Theory and Supersymnetry which posits a maximum of 11 dimensions of spacetime which may include 7 higher dimensions, interaction between membranes of 2 and 5 dimensions --- I'm not trying to knit it all together or declare it sound, merely pointing out the obvious prevalence of primes.
So is our reality built upon a quiet firmament of ordinal components... like a delicate machine constructed by a patient hand on a table in a room somewhere, which is sending you down the rabbit hole again because you have to ask, where did all that order come from?
Or does our reality consist a stable island in a sea of chaos, its apparent-stability arising from the perfect mathematical resonance of primes that cannot be factored? Perhaps... the exchange of energies in higher-than-three dimensions creating a fractal noise that would have reduced everything to noise, by a process akin to factorization, if it were not for the meta-existence of prime-ness?
That's the question I'm having a difficult time putting out to everyone here.
TBH, I expect the reason for MS hiding the file extension was because of idiots changing the extension when renaming the file [...] What has since happened in Win 7 and above (possibly Vista, although I don't remember this specifically) is that F2/rename now just selects the filename, not the extension. For all the shit they've pulled I find this quite a nice touch.
Agreed. Yeah, that rename-extension-selected thing.
When I was teaching Windows I actually had an antidote for that. It is nigh-well impossible to get a novice to drag-select the whole primary name without getting the dot sometimes, and retyping the whole thing with extension introduces anxiety (since they know once they start typing it would disappear and they must remember). When doing file maintenance in Explorer I always taught keyboard reliance to the greatest extent possible. At the least, use of the keyboard from the moment the window was up and in focus.
The trick is to introduce shift+left-right-arrow selection at the same time. "Okay you're in Windows Explorer inside the window and it has focus, see the title is bright? There's a DICK.DOC and you want to rename it to JANE.DOC.
"Type DICK" (D I C K) "Whoa -- you jumped right to it, you're there. See it selected?" "Now remember, F2 to rename. Go ahead." (F2) [name+extension selected] "That box means you're renaming it." "But whoops, that dot-DOC at the end is also selected you want to leave that alone!" "Here's what you are going to do. Hold down shift and tap left-arrow four times, then release SHIFT. Go" (SHIFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT) [selection backs up and now only primary name is selected] "Good. Now type JANE, then ENTER"
So in a world of almost invariably three-letter extensions they learned 'rename' as the aggregate operation of F2 SHIFT LEFTx4... within a minute they could be jumping to and renaming files as fast as they could type.
After they were confident with keyboard renames I'd show them how during the rename, a mouse doubleclick+drag allows the selection to jump a word at a time, and it is easy to select up to the dot. But by then they already knew a 'better' keyboard-only way to do complete renames and favored that.
Like sheep! Baaaah. Silly primates with their ordinal fixation, it was inevitable for the counters of cows and sheep to become counters of protons.
"How is everything that is different different from everything else?" Fair question, perhaps the ultimate question. So we started with four elements: "One, two... three... four! A ha ha ha ha!" says the Count. Then we got real and stuffed the periodic table with critters.
[Bruce Alexander] There is a technique called mass spectrometry that is pretty good at counting protons, albeit indirectly. If you take an element, and strip of an electron you make it slightly positively charged. If you ping it through a gap between two oppositely charged plates (one negatively charged, and one positively charged), then the positively charged element will be repelled by the positive plate and attracted to the negatively charged plate. How fast the element moves towards the negative plate depends on how heavy the element is and, as the weight of an element depends on how many protons it has (as well as neutrons) you can 'count' the number of protons by measuring how fast the element moves towards the negative plate.
Okay so you're confidently shaving off what you think is an individual electron, observing the behavior of the resulting mass to infer a number of what you presume are individual protons. Q: How many decimal places of surety does this give us that in fact we are dealing with an ordinal number of things that act out on a linear scale? I wonder. How many electron licks does it take to get to the proton center of an atom-pop? Let's ask Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl just bit and swallowed the damned thing. Then I passed out of boring ordinal space into dream-time. In my dream I wondered how the fabric of reality knits together. Is the Hand Of God counting, "a-one, a-two, a-threee... crunch!" for every atom? What is the Hand with those wiggly ordinal fingers? Then I thought of entropy and radiation, the dances of the little electron chicks in their shells.
In order to build an atomic firmament suitable for every day use -- a quantum boundary of is-ness below which things are not just made of smaller things, al absurdium, nature must change the rules. At this boolean primordial level there can only be is-ness and is-not-ness, one and zero so the only way to change the rules is to NEGATE them. In other words, a flav fly groovy flip in which things are different from other things because of the absence of something, not the presence of something. Bizarre. What would that something that is absent, be? Because I like prime numbers one meta-universal topic came to mind. It may be the only possible answer.
FACTORABILITY. What if... what we know as discrete atomic elements are the shapes of relative stability that are BEST represented -- not by ordinal proton count -- but by prime numbers, as islands in a seething quantum foam, their stability arising by nature's inability to factor them further? What if the quantum firmament is continually 'factoring' thing
Air traffic controllers at LA center were forced to turn off clipping on Wednesday (cheat code 'idclip') when a high-flying U2 spy plane crossed the control area, sending inclined vertices soaring to 60,000 feet. "This really screwed up the level map," one unnamed controller said, "here we had commercial pilots navigating the prescribed holding tunnels, galloping up and down stairs, jumping to activate the rising platform that takes them into th final approach ramp. So you're a pilot and you have your chainsaw at the ready and all of a sudden you're up against this 60,000 foot wall. We didn't even know what it was then. And it's moving! Even with a thousand cacodemons under your belt, you're not ready for this."
"The 'fake 3D Doom 2 engine' has served American aviation well over the years. It runs on the piston and vacuum tube difference engines still used by the FAA. There are limitations but the math is fast. It's why modern airports tend to sprawl over large areas, though we've had to install higher fences with opaque textures around the runways to hide ground objects on adjacent runways and nearby buildings. When you're ready to touch down the lag can be incredible."
The decision to turn off clipping was necessary but it came with a price. Few pilots had ever experienced no-clip mode, and while a few admitted to a sudden sense of exhilaration as they were liberated from the cruel physics of aviation -- most were anxious, even terrified. When asked why, one reacted with astonishment, almost anger. "Well shit, we're pilots. Avoiding things is just what we do. It's a trained response to avoid things. And it did not help at all when a few assholes broke formation and started to buzz through other airplanes. Every one of us was thinking, they're going to turn clipping on sooner or later, I hope it happens after this jerk gets off my ass."
Others who requested not to be identified had other stories. "We began in formation then matched vector, then merged completely. I mean really merged. The passengers were really startled those from other planes floated into view and entered the cabin. Then someone started laughing, probably in sheer terror, but soon everyone was laughing and it was great fun. Isn't it funny how when something scary doesn't kill you immediately, you want to laugh? Isn't it?" After a moment he laughed suddenly.
Collision alarms were not designed for no-clip and many were sounding constantly and could be heard clearly as pilots spoke over the radio channel. To make matters worse, the effect of no-clip was not confined to aircraft or the facilities. One pilot on approach noted "I almost swerved instinctively to avoid a fire truck sailing past, it must have floated off a ramp in the upper garage but there it was right in the approach path. Then this guy -- a businessman clutching a briefcase -- appeared and stopped in midair. He was flapping around like a butterfly, obviously pleased with himself for sailing through the glass of the upper lounge and out into the field. Then he turned slowly and there was this 200 ton aircraft bearing down on him. Like a stupid squirrel he fled directly down the flight path, glancing back. The look on his face as he passed through the cockpit was priceless."
Landing was extremely difficult during this period. "Impossible, actually. In no-clip you're not really landing on anything, just trying to stop descending when you THINK you're on the ground. Fortunately there was no stall physics in play so we took it slow and I had the co-pilot hanging out the window trying to gauge the moment the wheels reached the ground. The plane in front of me was obviously waiting for touchdown, he just sunk into the tarmac and disappeared. I hear he drifted around under the airport for awhile and finally rose into a parking lot. They had to knock down fences to get it towed back to the field."
i haven't used an Apple product since the 90's but weren't Apple computers the first to hide the extension and instead differentiate in the icon only?
The last Apple I used was a Lisa so take this with a grain of salt. Well, a few minutes here and there on various Macs...
In DOS where the extension determine what it should be... or unix where a few bytes at the beginning of the file had better fit some 'Magic' pattern it knows... the OS's involvement ends with name, basic attribute flags and timestamps, the file itself is a single blob of data or code (don't know which 'till you try to parse into it)...
Apple decided to do differently. In HFS each file object consists of a primary name that you see, but also a type code that served the same purpose as the file extension. These codes were assigned and strictly maintained by Apple to avoid collisions. So the type info used by the OS was not merely hidden, it was separately maintained and you could only 'patch' a file's type with special utilities. So you weren't just plopping files and driving off, the proper type code had to be installed along with it.
The HFS file record also led to a 'data fork' which contained the blob of the file itself. But also a Resource Fork that is a little structured database maintained by MacOS. If you're Windows-oriented think of it as a little slice of Registry stored alongside the file. Like the Registry, MacOS maintains the resource fork, you can only access it via queries and commands. It was a convenient place to drop application-specific information (even local memory swap I think) and some resource forks could grow large.
So when it came time to share a file, Windows and unix people were just emailing it to one another over the newly formed Arpanet Inter-Network, which was built with pistons and valves and old brass speaking tubes, it made this delightful hiss as your data was transmitted... they were just exchanging a data glob with a name and sometimes an extension.
But some Apple apps needed extra baggage to transmit and receive a single document, which when it arrived in DOS could take form of a folder whose name was vaguely derived from the file name (remember Apple used long names and DOS did not) and two subfolders DATA and RSRC that contained a parseable resource database where you'd wind the file's full name, its magic type code and stuff. One popular method of reducing this to a single file was the Stuffit archive+compression format. There were lots of third-party apps to help Windows and Mac communicate and make sense of these file formats. Mac OS X is more unixy.
What ease of use? it provides them with no more knowledge and doesn't make a web page any easier to use, if they don't understand a URL they are already not typing it or touching it. Hiding it just ensures further ignorance for no benefit.
Hah. Like Microsoft deciding that file name dot-extensions were the devil's workshop and must be hidden from view by default. So people did not learn them, and became vulnerable to whole new classes of malware attack and needless confusion, especially when sharing files.
Whenever I set up a new Windows showing file extensions and showing full path in address bar was the first change I'd make. Turn on URL address bars (some OEMs turned them off!), status lines, full detail everything. And people learned how their folders were organized and how to recognize malevolent attachments because I'd tell them they should learn extensions and look out for weird names, only the last one counts. When they reinstalled Windows they'd call and say "Hey! Windows is screwed up, I'm not seeing the full file name." Now they were savvy enough I could tell them where to find those options over the phone. They demanded full disclosure, nothing less.
Deliberately hiding details because they confuse people is not a solid reason for turning everything into its fisher price equivalent.
Hah. The other day a friend showed me his Android phone. The screen was black, in the middle there was this dumb looking LEGO robot lying on its back, something like this. "You're the computer whiz. What does this mean?" I looked at it for a moment, jabbed my finger repeatedly on the unresponsive little screen that has no buttons like a bird bumping against a window.
Then I said,
"It appears that clever engineers have managed to make a full color megapixel display that is capable of showing a whole chapter of text say absolutely NOTHING. The machine knows something is wrong, that's why it retrieved the image and is showing it. It knows what it was trying to do, what did not work as expected. There are details and helpful hints inside, but they decided that you wanted to see this dumb robot instead. These people are messing with your mind. They think you are stupid. They think you are easily confused and need to see a picture of a robot and a red triangle when something goes wrong. They don't trust you with details. They don't think you can handle the truth. And you know what? When you call them the person you speak to will probably not know any more than I do, they'll tell you to push some secret reset button and hope for the best. Well here's what you have to do. But does it show a diagram indicating where the reset button is? No, you're supposed to look at a dead robot carcass instead. Because you're nothing to them.
You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
While I was saying all of this, the robot disappeared and the phone rebooted.
People don't ask me for computer help much any more.
Do people here really know that when they mod for false reasons, they're breaking the rules? Just wondering.
You did a fine job. They are not aware that they are modding for false reasons, they just think you're crazy, welcome to the club. And they haven't read enough on the subject.
The Greenhouse Effect page at Wikipedia doesn't help much here. It canonizes Fourier as the effect's founding father but fails to mention -- as you have correctly tried to point out -- that he carried out experiments with 'real greenhouse' apparatus with a physical barrier, (correctly) identified convection as the heating mechanism yet also (incorrectly) envisioned there might be an atmospheric phenomenon that also acted as a true barrier. To discover this you must visit Fourier's own page and see that "Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes."
So to them there is only one Greenhouse Effect and your definition does not fit, so it's a 'taking the Lord's name in vain' kinda thing.
Fourier deserves no ire for this disproved hypothesis, though it does present a challenge to modern editors and mules of consensus: there are two Greenhouse Effects. To honor Dr. Seuss we'll call them Thing One (Fourier's greenhouse) and Thing Two (the re-radiation explanation).
Once upon a time in the dark age of science, January 24, 2005, the Greenhouse Effect Wiki page was short and sweet. Thing One and Thing Two had equal billing in the introduction, although Thing Two "is a matter of some dispute". Then a section "The natural greenhouse effect" which actually described Thing Two and a section "Real greenhouses" for Thing One.
The Wikipedia discussion pages of these and subsequent edits are interesting and read like a heated Slashdot discussion (on a good day): Talk2, Talk3, Talk4, Talk5, Talk6. Some even wanted to abolish Thing One, or re-state both as 'conflicting' hypotheses. When the dust clears Thing One must describe the greenhouse for which it was named. And it would be really embarrassing to admit in the 21st century that we don't know how a greenhouse works.
All in all I'm pretty comfortable with Wikipedia's definition of Thing One. Thing Two I still consider to be -- as the Wiki page said back in 2005, "a matter of some dispute". CO2 is rising sharply and temp not so much or at all, depending where you look, and how closely you examine the 'adjustments' that have been made. And there are mechanisms unexplored as I've pointed out in other threads... but as yet these are cautious days for science. People are crowing and squawking about almost-infinitesimal delta in a very complex system.
Joseph Fourier may have nailed Thing One and only glimpsed Thing Two but he really knew his way around noise and how sligh
Maybe by making executions much more visceral we'll be less inclined to make them clean and clinical and stop thinking about them as clean and clinical.
You nailed it. There are two evils here.
The first evil is that the taking of life is necessary. I personally believe this is a necessary evil, there should be such a thing as a 'capital crime', one for which death is the sentence. By no means should it be a fast track slam dunk from conviction to execution. People make mistakes and there must be time and opportunity to appeal, for new evidence or suppressed evidence to come to light.
To anyone who might think that life in prison without chance of parole is an acceptable alternative to execution, I beg you to try to distinguish it from human torture and slavery and ask yourself... which is more enlightened: an eye-for-an-eye society in which the sentence is compatible with the crime... or one that places human beings in bare concrete zoos for life? It is a tough question and I'm glad to see some thoughtful answers, especially those with opinions that differ from my own.
The second and more insidious evil is whitewashing the act of execution in ways that make it seem more 'palatable' or 'executioner-friendly'. Replacing the firing squad with a needle is just the lame substitution of one horror for another. What does that say about us? No, I do not believe it is of any value for the accused to suffer or be conscious of the throes of death once the moment arrives.
Dispense with the drugs, the gasses, the electricity, even the rope-hangin'. Drugs and electricity are heinous because due to human physiology they are unable to accurately deliver a precise and unequivocal moment of death. Hanging is particularly heinous, it is merely a form of beheading where the brain is guaranteed seconds of torment. I say we can dispense with that.
By all means use technology. Bring back the firing squad: multiple large caliber guns directed by computer software that targets the head and neck. The usual multiple enable buttons that seem to help several executioners sleep better at night (but why I'm not sure). Then a random delay, then the guns electrically fire in unison so the bullets arrive before the sound. No pain or even cognition for the accused, but lots of mess.
For the families of the condemned -- every funeral is a closed casket funeral. No amount of cosmetic surgery will re-create that peaceful, angelic innocent face lying in the casket, arms folded, that invites denial and confirmation bias.
And use Google Glass facial recognition software for the firing squad guns. I love Google but I also like to rattle their cages.
Forget the talking lampposts and Wifi enabled potholes. Although it would be cool if traffic lights broadcast riddles and puzzles, awarding an immediate green light to the first driver to solve it.
My idea for a Smart City would be to re-vamp and modernize the CB radio concept, every vehicle would have a short range hands-free digital two way radio so drivers could speak to other drivers in close proximity: you could make general comments to all or incline your head towards a particular car and send a more private message. With a certain gesture after a reply was received, the system could 'lock' the connection so you could continue the conversation even after you leave the zone.
It's easy to see this as an absurd novelty that would be used to pass on road rage... and there would be a shake-down period in which that may be its most common use... but thinking past that I find a lot of promise in the idea. Pedestrians could join in. Cafes or other buildings could have a corner in which one could hear road-talk, or even participate. Little billboards would soon pop up, like a new era of Burma-Shave, that try to suggest topics or invite a response.
In other words, the Smartest thing to do is not award some sweetheart contract to a tech firm to 'redesign' the city at all. Don't mess with the damned city. Use technology to find new ways for the people in the city to communicate with one another. Every time we develop new technology that allows strangers with mutual interests to meet who would not otherwise meet (such as academia or the Internet) we take human evolution up a notch.
The only Smart City that I'd really want to live in would be one where all the buildings and road signs were on hydraulic struts, and everything bobs and dances like Toon Town.
What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.
Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.
Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.
If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.
I'm afraid I don't see how 3D printing brings any benefit here - a laser cutter or CNC machine fed with durable, stabilized sheets of plastic would be faster and produce *far* more durable pages.
Of course you're right. Etching by laser on solid sheets of plastic or slow-corrosion metal is the thing. Just desperately trying to come up with ways in which 3D printing might be useful to salvage the time I've spent reading about it. Never mind all the time others have spent trying to make it work.
If you want to place a barrier between knowledge levels, call them 'magnification-stops' in your approach where certain technology and knowledge obtained by the years like 1700, 1800, 1900, 1950, 2000 is encoded with successive difficulty --- then if history is any clue you're best bet is to change medium and method at each stop.
Optics for example. The advancement from a lens allowing the eye to discern Mars clearly to one able to construct a great microscope may be an accident of local geology, quartz and silica, or a single individual's experiments in glass manufacture. There could even be an alternate history where mercury in spinning dishes is optics. You have a clean progression to 100x magnification with a single stage, then it takes compound lenses and take it to 1000x You can push it a little further by using filters to reduce the color component, but you hit the wall of visible light.
Now to break that Reading Rainbow 800-1000x barrier we're in the realm of coherent photons using lasers to 'read' (project and reflect through optics) or scatter (holography). And further on into using streams of electrons where the only usable means optick is electromagnetism shaped by precisely wound coils and some gruesome electronics.
Could there be a single object that is an Easy Reader through all possible optical resolutions, but also incorporates successive levels, the greatest of which is only readable with electrons? That is a challenge but do-able since you can read through things with electrons. The visible stages act as protection for this fragile inner layer.
Perhaps for the intermediate stages requiring laser technology the colorful yet color-challenged field of 2 dimensional holography might offer a solution... something that resembles Asimov's Prime Radiant without the computey stuff, where a coherent beam of laser light will scatter off of foil and project material onto the wall, and precise movement of the object or the beam will 'scroll'.
This being Slashdot, I have to suggest that at some point the Thing will might digital, where we apply leverage to Hamming and Huffman for encoding and error correction... BUT now the content is sub-coded in a series of arbitrary choices that represent our evolution of information technology... and not necessarily anyone else's. To one familiar with the optick perusal of language-symbols, going digital, which we've done gradually -- to those who have only our Prime Radiant as a guide -- it would be a wall of incomprehensibility that would take time to crack.
I just had this idea that at some low resolution text might offer a delicious recipe for Taco Sauce, and a tiny dollop of this concoction makes its way into a tiny space between the letters... completely obliterating the 13th century.
Completely losing the 13th century has happened before. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance (but not its present whereabouts) can be seen here in the brief clip from the 1975 movie "R
Walk yourself through the steps, support structure and equipment that would be required to pull that off balanced against the likelihood of getting caught. Then you might sleep better. Evil ones tend to choose easier paths.
"Hello --- Doc --- I'm having trouble getting to sleep lately. The sheep are wearing strange equipment, some carry rolls of blueprints in their mouth. But the most bizarre thing is, they're counting down not up. I tried flipping my mattress over but I just wound up underneath it. What should I do??"
But more seriously, what we have here is a reminder that Insider threats are the most serious challenge confronting ___________ in today's world, Captain Obvious says. This modern post-9/11 genre has its roots in the classical Reader's Digest series Hints From Heloise, in which a calm trusted voice would soothe troubled housewives with too much time on their hands by suggesting tiny improvements and shortcuts like cutting empty bleach bottles into new, functional shapes and experimenting with food. Don't just think outside the box, why not cut the front off the boxes, paint them with cheerful latex colors and stack them in the closet to organize shoes. Occasionally something insightful and amazing has arisen from it such as the triple-Decker grill cheese sandwich.
But more seriously, the Stanford Scholars are capitalizing on the general condition of the times, camping out at the triple-Decker sandwich where Hints from Heloise, Safety Culture and the Security Culture meet. They are paving a new lecture circuit. And (if you skim down TA) Obviously a series of "don't assume" posters. Dilbert's boss has the whole set. Some are hung upside down.
Go to Vegas and ask anyone who makes 100k+ a year doing security what works and they'll tell you that a general, intelligent sense of situational awareness is best. Let your people watch lots of people so they can learn to read people. A set of SIMPLE guidelines and procedures to follow, the freedom to share suspicious with superiors with confidentiality and without prejudice and you're done. You've assembled the best security machine possible.
But that should be obvious too.
I believe that there is a move afoot to capitalize on the post-Fukushima radiation fear as applied to operating nuclear power plants, in the same way that there was a dirty bomb rad-fad some years past. And yes, some of the threat is coming from within. I speak of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent 'shocking' news item "Uneven enforcement suspected at nuclear plants which was covered here at Slashdot. Where an organization charged with security oversight stoops to insinuation and fear-mongering in the press even though doing so is an admission of incompetence. I am forced to conclude that some useless eaters have invaded the Security and Safety cultures. On that I have already spoken my piece. Warning: severe tire damage.
Friend, you should condense your post a bit and submit it as a topic on its own: "Ask Slashdot: What form could the best modern Rosetta Stone take?" Rosetta not just for language cross-translation of course, but the general idea of knowledge preservation.
Something like HD-rosetta "microfiche tablets" are also an option, though you have to keep in mind the level of technology necessary to read the engraving at the desired scale.
Reading this I think immediately of 3D printing technology. So far I have seen a few great uses for it, such as the printing of replacement parts necessary to keep something running or to fashion the unique precise shapes to replace body parts... and so many not-so-great or BLAH uses such as soap dishes, uncomfortable weird-looking chairs or (my un-favorite) guns that will some day explode in yer face because those 'casual' 3D printed molecular bonds are just not up to the challenge.
But a 3D printed book with pages of stable plastic and holes that are letters could still be be like-new and readable in 1000 years, if stored properly. It's DO-ABLE.
Hocus's Whats-The-Use Law of knowledge preservation:
When civilization is simple, the useful laws of nature are so damned obvious that no one wastes their time carving them in stone, so all you may read from that era is silly political fluff about kings and wars.
When civilization is complicated and knowledge immense, despite advances in technology no one bothers to create textbooks that might last more than 30 years because what's the use, at the end of that period they might be *slightly* incorrect. There's no viable business model for knowledge preservation that pays off in the short term. Most people are too distracted to sift through the noise to gather and present essential knowledge. Those few who do have the time are typically unable to produce a viable product (which is where 3D printing comes in).
I go for your Rosetta stone at successive levels of magnification, though each level should be a separate object. Books you can read directly will be handed around casually, while 100x and 1000x texts must be carefully stored.
But there should be texts printed in all resolutions. In some hypothetical future dark age, nothing would jump-start the re-invention of precision optics faster than showing them a continuous spiral of text that recedes into optical "invisibility".
I think the boom stuff (gunpowder and runaway nuclear fission) should be represented on all levels with the benefits and hazards clearly indicated, because you do not want to encourage the formation of secret societies and tyrants who confiscate microscopes and go around to destroy all high resolution copies (except their own) to keep some temporary strategic advantage. Dynamite has helped us to build more infrastructure than it has destroyed. Far more nuclear fission has been released to keep us warm in Winter than to take human life. The more people aware of these possibilities the better tha chance that we will make the right decisions. If every classic civilization had run their own Alexandria Library and traded copies freely with it, so much more history would be available today.
I look forward an Ask Slashdot on the topic that explores it better than the one last June where the Whats The Use doom sayers seemed to defend the court against new ideas.
IMO, CP/M should get him the award, not even considering BIOS...
While Tandy TRS-DOS was my first OS, CP/M on Vector Graphic, Kaypro and Televideo systems was the first one I dove into. In the BDOS I could disassemble memory to instructions and actually figure out what was going on. CP/M was the 8-bit bread and butter of the 8080/Z80 age.
In 1980 at age 16 I wrote a proof of concept product, a TSR (terminate and stay resident') program for CP/M systems called DataCrypt. You'd load it on startup and be prompted for a pass phrase and it would hash the phrase, tuck itself into ~2k above your COMMAND.COM and terminate-resident, intercepting file I/O. When any running program created or opened a file matching one of several (user-settable) wildcard patterns such as $$??????.???, it would perform transparent crypt or de-crypt of each 128-byte sector.
So with DataCrypt resident you could use WordStar and work with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted documents. If the program used your primary name with a special extension (like *.$$$) for temporary files even those would be encrypted on disk.
I sent it out to several folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for review but got no bites. At the time there were few computer folk as interested in data security as I was. But even then I was aware that TRUE security was a long distance away. The prototype's CRC32/XOR snake oil encryption had only 32 bits of entropy, which is a wink and a chuckle these days. True DES encryption would have been a slow deal.
One project I did, a series of mods c.1981 to bring real POS invoicing to an early version of Peachtree Accounting, was a BEAR. It was written in MBASIC running under CP/M -- Interpreted tokenized BASIC running on a machine that started with a 64k transient program area. No extended memory then!
Minus OS call kernel, COMMAND.COM, minus BASIC interpreter, your program was born with ~32k to use in its lifetime. So 32k minus the size of the program itself left you with a memory heap for variables. The heap grew downward with every string assignment and when it bumped into the code there would be this pause for "garbage collection" while the heap was de-fragged and re-written to the top of memory again.
No comments, too much room! No long var names! You'd use CHAIN to jump to another program leaving vars in memory. But if you your were clever you'd carve out line number ranges and place temporary functions into 'overlays' that loaded over existing portions. When you did a MERGE no p-code optimization or block was going on here, any load command did its work line by line, it was like a really fast monkey typing in the program code.
So in place of Peachtree's default invoice which was clunky and required lots of input steps (mostly useless for cash sales) to implement a streamlined invoice was difficult. They use lots of strings. My first attempt worked great --- but every couple of line items the heap would touch and trigger global garbage collection -- ~3 to 5 seconds where the machine would be unresponsive. In those THREADLESS 8-bit days when garbage collection began your keyboard controller would save ONE keystroke but the rest would be LOST. This is a total wash. Clearly it needed a whole re-write.
The only way I could make the entry portion useable was to throw out the programming concepts that made things 'easy' (yet caused heap movement). Don't assemble a string of spaces, use a loop to emit them one CHR$() at a time. Don't assign to strings, pre-allocate a number of strings of reasonable length and use MID$() to replace its contents, keep a separate string length var so you can only emit the portion of the string that was being used.
It was sorta like coding in C, in BASIC. That was kind of a 'door' problem. But it worked. Then the world went CBASIC and all our problems magically vanished.
I tend to side with the pragmatic individuals here who are saying, it's bad enough that our modern historical record lacks the fine grain of Matthew Brady's silver emulsion plates and are generally USELESS for blow-ups of large groups of humans standing in groups --- "Mommy why does granny look like my LEGO people?"
In order to preserve what vibrant detail can be captured and push focus tricks into post-production where they belong, how about this,
A stereo multi-megapixel camera, where a second ccd+lens is on an outrigger that stores against the body but can be slid or swung out to human eye separation or better. It would click into position parallel with the main lens, but could also swivel outward and click precisely ~30,45 degrees out, so you could more easily build stitchable panoramas.
The operating modes:
1. Ultimate 3D HQ stereo photographs where the max resolution of both lenses is committed to memory, for panorama stitching or delaying 3D parallax calcs to post processing.
2. A series of more economical 2.5D modes from high to low resolution where a single photo is captured into memory --- but also --- a separate grey channel is saved, which is built by calculating parallax displacement of the pictures arriving from the lenses to the best of the camera's ability at max internal resolution, a smooth overlay that ranges from black=none=distant to nearby=white=close.
Your separate grey parallax channel saved in the 2.5 modes arrives into Photoshop ready to serve as a range selection mask so you can do these evil information-destroying transforms to your heart's content -- based on 'true' depth information.
or combine. Anything folded into the cause of 'good parenting', however tenuous, puts it off-limits culturally,
Drone Baby Monitor Baby's First Drone
Marketing tags revisited, 1950s: Drone-A-Tron, Atomic Baby 1970s: 'Euro' Drones, 'Euro' Babies 1980s: Power Drones, Power Babies 1990s: My Little Drone, My Little Baby 2000s: Green Drones, Carbon Neutral Babies 2010s: 'Flava' Drones, Organic Babies
Perhaps Americans are uncomfortable these days generally. Was there an adequate control? Did Pew select a group to not ask any questions at all, just stare silently to observe for signs of fidgeting or restlessness?
As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more,
There is no single LFTR concept. When you say there is no separate blanket you seem to be describing a one-fluid design. Weinberg's MSRE was never intended as such, it was a first stage in the development of a two-fluid Thorium breeder where a separate loop of fertile Thorium within the core breeds. The two-fluid design was envisioned by Weinberg as a best-fit solution to the management of long term waste products. I believe this is still true today.
When we scale massive I think a ~300 year waste storage is doable and worth doing.
Is that LFTR operating temperature of 700 C supposed to be a scare-figure? Are we comparing a fluid fuel technology that achieves its negative temperature coefficient of reactivity from its inherent design, where the heat-density variation of the fissile maintains this equilibrium -- with a water reactor model where sudden loss of coolant invites solid fuel temperatures to rise to 2200 C under explosive runaway conditions? Now that's a scare-figure.
The folks maintaining our water reactors have done a professional and stellar job to keep the water flowing all these years. I think it's time they deserve a break.
David LeBlanc gave a great little lecture on LFTR design topics at TEAC3 outlining the one vs. two fluid approach. In it he alludes to what LFTR designers call "the plumbing problem", in which ORNL's two-fluid design with its multiple tubes of fertile and fissile through the core promised to be a daunting challenge of engineering, thermal expansion at the various barriers being a wildcard that may affect the stable temperature coefficient they were striving for.
So LeBlanc has continued Weinberg's work by simplifying -- he envisions a "single tube within a tube" design where the ORNL's short and squat reactor with its many tubes in core becomes taller and thinner with a single barrier between fertile and fissile. If those illustrations leave you wanting more, here is a 2011 whitepaper that covers its advantages.
ORNL all but abandoned work on two fluids after Weinberg's time in what I see as a series of compromises where diminishing budget, increasing proliferation concern and (I'm being a bit brutal) obviously less concern about single fluid long-term waste products. Or (less brutal) perhaps they have an optimistic view that as we push into it we will become far more adept with transuranics.
In addition to a refined two-fluid design, LeBlanc is covering all the bases. He took the stage again in TEAC5 to promote the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor, which he hopes may be a 'best-fit LFTR' for now.
The problem is that so many things that seem to be best fits turn out to be compromises that entrench themselves, as have water reactors. My personal sympathies are with Kirk Sorensen in his quest to realize Weinberg's two-fluid LFTR idea with its LOW ~300 year waste impact -- I believe it may be a best-fit for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
No "they" didn't have a LFTR reactor working in the 70s. Nobody's EVER had an LFTR working. There is no liquid-fluorine thorium Santa Claus, just a lot of grad student Powerpoint presentations.
Thank you for calling the Thorium hotline. YES THERE IS A THORIUM SANTA CLAUS! I've ridden on his sleigh, he even let me ring the jingle bells. Even if you are a sourpuss you are welcome to come along for a ride too: the Thorium Remix 2011. It's two hours long so bring some snacks.
I grew up amid Cold War fear and graduated to fossil fuel angst, coal concern. Then over the years I have witnessed a parade of 'renewable' wind and solar energy farm dreams where an absurd complexity of grid interconnect, tiny yields and moveable parts scales up to power -- a medieval society, maybe. A bad dream we should do the math and awaken from. So I resolved that our future should be nuclear... because modern civilization followed me home and I decided to keep it.
So it was with astonished relief that I learned that there was more than one way to do nuclear.
Dr. Alvin Weinberg PhD, one of the original patent holders of the Light Water reactor was slightly more than a graduate student. He was so obsessed with the idea that liquid fuels delivered greater safety and scalability, he sacrificed the remainder of his career in a vain attempt to convince the Navy (Rickover was running the show) to pursue liquid fuel and then, brazenly, went directly to the public -- a prominent scientist of the Atoms For Peace program warning about safety issues of water reactors was very embarassing. He soon lost the battle and his position as director at Oak Ridge.
I'm no diplomat apologist. I am pissed off by Admiral Rickover's lack of forward vision in 1973. With one phone call he could have prevented Weinberg's dismissal, preserved molten salt research and set human kind on a much better course.
There was a molten-salt reactor, a laboratory-scale device fuelled with U-233 and later U-235 in intermittent operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratories for a few years in the 1960s. It never used thorium and wouldn't have been any good if it had because it couldn't breed thorium up into U-233 to fission for energy.
Because the plumbing and the scale was wrong. They did not put a Thorium blanket around the test reactor because they already knew that Thorium breeding would work, and wanted direct access to the core to make neutron measurements. The ARE and MSRE were projects to prove that the chemistry could achieve criticality and remain stable... also refine the engineering.
In terms of ground covered between theory and finished commercial product, the 1965-1969 MSRE was an masterpiece 'hack' of high-tech (more chemistry than nuclear engineers were accustomed to) -- and low-tech (salt plug drain), delivered.
Anyone in any industry who makes such progress with a single experiment in so little time should feel rightfully proud.
There are also experiments going on to see how thorium works in regular light-water reactors. The physics says it will work, it's not as energetic as regular uranium fuels though. Baby steps baby steps.
Thorium as solid fuel in water reactors is 'several hundred years doomed' commercially. Uranium works better as a solid fuel and will not be scarce for awhile.
In regards to LFTR I respectfully think it's time to take big steps, big steps. As concerted an effort as those steps on the moon.
Corrosion schmoesion. We're not talking safety issues here in a system that carries high pressure, inherent steam and hydrogen explosion risk. LFTR will be just a bunch of standard bolt-together plumbing at normal atmospheric pressure. Replace and recycle everything every ten years until the corrosion issues ar
The second one would cost half as much. The 20th one might cost as much as an airplane.
And using closed cycle Brayton it could be sited anywhere, even far away from a major source of water. And as far away from people, who tend to congregate around water, as desired.
The present regulatory apparatus, which is wholly oriented to a solid fuel water reactor technology that carries risk of decay heat meltdown, steam and hydrogen explosion, large scale venting of radioactivity -- needs to be reevaluated and adjusted rationally for this technology -- which carries none of these risks.
With due and fond respect for the things that helped us become civilized people... it is time to end the age of steam and fossil fuel.
This is not a rant on bioengineering per se. Humans deliberately producing Things with desirable traits is as old as rain. But when I see folks attempting to leverage marginally successful processes into solutions to Big Problems by reducing the margins... I have to take a step backwards to glimpse more of the picture.
If you are going to involve 'new' plants (or animals) in the production of energy, pause to think.
1. Energy required by humans is a monster growing exponentially. This monster EATS. This is inevitable. If you only have 1.3 children, someone else will have 4.3, if you conserve, they won't. Enforcement leads to conflict, escalation and war, the biggest energy waster of them all. So Big Problems must be eliminated, not achieved by legislation and (imagined) compliance.
2. The most cherished notions of sustainability and conservation involve taking a snapshot -- preserving Gaia as it exists today. In other words we are not obsessed with creating new forms of life because we are bored with the old ones. Though fluorescing pigs are really cool. Every little push for biofuels, even given 4x improvement in process efficiency, directly feeds the monster and his appetite is increasing too quickly.
(Such as the ongoing advance of the great Human Palm Oil Desert across Asia. This phenomenon permits Europeans to obtain diesel fuel and maintain their small tracts of land in pristine state, while the devastation wrought by Palm Oil monoculture remains comfortably distant.)
There is NO such thing as a sustainable biological source of energy on the scales we do and will consume it. Period. Advocates of biofuels imagine happy farmers that would be glad to drop what they are doing and make fuel inefficiently. And unused tracts of land, such as Brooklyn, in which these massive bio-chemical endeavors would reside. This is fantasy. There are only large scale Unintended Consequences down this path. And every corner of the Earth is now claimed and defended by people who would rather keep it as it is -- biologically.
3. There is only ONE source of energy that could scale quickly to power the grid, leaving hydrocarbons for fuel and chemical precursors (plastic, fertilizer) until their clean replacements arise. And eventually through separation of hydrogen from water and nitrogen from air, those too.
It's nuclear, and more specifically liquid fuel reactors.
4. Instead of BADLY transforming our biosphere with yet more engineered plant monocultures -- and if you thought food was intrusive wait 'till you run the numbers on energy -- energy production needs to become limitless, small, efficient, self contained, safe and clean.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be honest, I had to read that a few times to really understand the thought process behind it, but that's a really interesting, and entirely plausible classification... I need to do more research.
(We're talking about THIS MESSAGE , in case Slashdot's moderators have completely hidden it from view) Thanks kindly for reading it. I feel like I'm in a schoolyard surrounded by bullies. For one thing, you cannot mention sheep these days without jabbing emotional buttons and hasty readers think you are trying to be insulting and lobbing -1 Flamebait epithets at people. Sheep as in counting sheep. We're talking about ordinal numbers, counting sheep. I'm not trying to insult anyone! Get it? Good. Baaaah.
Numerical prime-ness also crops up in dimension count. We directly perceive the existence of a 'stable' 3-dimensional space. The most elaborate universe model that has yet been constructed on a backboard is M-Theory and Supersymnetry which posits a maximum of 11 dimensions of spacetime which may include 7 higher dimensions, interaction between membranes of 2 and 5 dimensions --- I'm not trying to knit it all together or declare it sound, merely pointing out the obvious prevalence of primes.
So is our reality built upon a quiet firmament of ordinal components... like a delicate machine constructed by a patient hand on a table in a room somewhere, which is sending you down the rabbit hole again because you have to ask, where did all that order come from?
Or does our reality consist a stable island in a sea of chaos, its apparent-stability arising from the perfect mathematical resonance of primes that cannot be factored? Perhaps... the exchange of energies in higher-than-three dimensions creating a fractal noise that would have reduced everything to noise, by a process akin to factorization, if it were not for the meta-existence of prime-ness?
That's the question I'm having a difficult time putting out to everyone here.
TBH, I expect the reason for MS hiding the file extension was because of idiots changing the extension when renaming the file [...] What has since happened in Win 7 and above (possibly Vista, although I don't remember this specifically) is that F2/rename now just selects the filename, not the extension. For all the shit they've pulled I find this quite a nice touch.
Agreed. Yeah, that rename-extension-selected thing.
When I was teaching Windows I actually had an antidote for that. It is nigh-well impossible to get a novice to drag-select the whole primary name without getting the dot sometimes, and retyping the whole thing with extension introduces anxiety (since they know once they start typing it would disappear and they must remember). When doing file maintenance in Explorer I always taught keyboard reliance to the greatest extent possible. At the least, use of the keyboard from the moment the window was up and in focus.
The trick is to introduce shift+left-right-arrow selection at the same time. "Okay you're in Windows Explorer inside the window and it has focus, see the title is bright? There's a DICK.DOC and you want to rename it to JANE.DOC.
"Type DICK" (D I C K) "Whoa -- you jumped right to it, you're there. See it selected?"
"Now remember, F2 to rename. Go ahead." (F2) [name+extension selected] "That box means you're renaming it."
"But whoops, that dot-DOC at the end is also selected you want to leave that alone!"
"Here's what you are going to do. Hold down shift and tap left-arrow four times, then release SHIFT. Go"
(SHIFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT) [selection backs up and now only primary name is selected]
"Good. Now type JANE, then ENTER"
So in a world of almost invariably three-letter extensions they learned 'rename' as the aggregate operation of F2 SHIFT LEFTx4 ... within a minute they could be jumping to and renaming files as fast as they could type.
After they were confident with keyboard renames I'd show them how during the rename, a mouse doubleclick+drag allows the selection to jump a word at a time, and it is easy to select up to the dot. But by then they already knew a 'better' keyboard-only way to do complete renames and favored that.
Score -1 Offtopic my shiny metal ass.
Offtopic and Overrated are the TL;DR of moderation. I hope some day they develop a spray for it.
Like sheep! Baaaah. Silly primates with their ordinal fixation, it was inevitable for the counters of cows and sheep to become counters of protons.
"How is everything that is different different from everything else?" Fair question, perhaps the ultimate question. So we started with four elements: "One, two... three... four! A ha ha ha ha!" says the Count. Then we got real and stuffed the periodic table with critters.
Q: How do I find the number of protons? A: You look it up in a table of the elements, silly! Baaa, wrong answer. Q: How did the scientists count the number of protons? A: They counted them just like you would, one by one. Baaaa. Wrong answer but I wish I'd said it. Q: Is there a certain way to count the protons in an element when identifying them? A: [quoted below] now we're getting somewhere...
[Bruce Alexander] There is a technique called mass spectrometry that is pretty good at counting protons, albeit indirectly. If you take an element, and strip of an electron you make it slightly positively charged. If you ping it through a gap between two oppositely charged plates (one negatively charged, and one positively charged), then the positively charged element will be repelled by the positive plate and attracted to the negatively charged plate. How fast the element moves towards the negative plate depends on how heavy the element is and, as the weight of an element depends on how many protons it has (as well as neutrons) you can 'count' the number of protons by measuring how fast the element moves towards the negative plate.
Okay so you're confidently shaving off what you think is an individual electron, observing the behavior of the resulting mass to infer a number of what you presume are individual protons. Q: How many decimal places of surety does this give us that in fact we are dealing with an ordinal number of things that act out on a linear scale? I wonder. How many electron licks does it take to get to the proton center of an atom-pop? Let's ask Mr. Owl. Mr. Owl just bit and swallowed the damned thing. Then I passed out of boring ordinal space into dream-time. In my dream I wondered how the fabric of reality knits together. Is the Hand Of God counting, "a-one, a-two, a-threee... crunch!" for every atom? What is the Hand with those wiggly ordinal fingers? Then I thought of entropy and radiation, the dances of the little electron chicks in their shells.
In order to build an atomic firmament suitable for every day use -- a quantum boundary of is-ness below which things are not just made of smaller things, al absurdium, nature must change the rules. At this boolean primordial level there can only be is-ness and is-not-ness, one and zero so the only way to change the rules is to NEGATE them. In other words, a flav fly groovy flip in which things are different from other things because of the absence of something, not the presence of something. Bizarre. What would that something that is absent, be? Because I like prime numbers one meta-universal topic came to mind. It may be the only possible answer.
FACTORABILITY. What if... what we know as discrete atomic elements are the shapes of relative stability that are BEST represented -- not by ordinal proton count -- but by prime numbers, as islands in a seething quantum foam, their stability arising by nature's inability to factor them further? What if the quantum firmament is continually 'factoring' thing
Air traffic controllers at LA center were forced to turn off clipping on Wednesday (cheat code 'idclip') when a high-flying U2 spy plane crossed the control area, sending inclined vertices soaring to 60,000 feet. "This really screwed up the level map," one unnamed controller said, "here we had commercial pilots navigating the prescribed holding tunnels, galloping up and down stairs, jumping to activate the rising platform that takes them into th final approach ramp. So you're a pilot and you have your chainsaw at the ready and all of a sudden you're up against this 60,000 foot wall. We didn't even know what it was then. And it's moving! Even with a thousand cacodemons under your belt, you're not ready for this."
"The 'fake 3D Doom 2 engine' has served American aviation well over the years. It runs on the piston and vacuum tube difference engines still used by the FAA. There are limitations but the math is fast. It's why modern airports tend to sprawl over large areas, though we've had to install higher fences with opaque textures around the runways to hide ground objects on adjacent runways and nearby buildings. When you're ready to touch down the lag can be incredible."
The decision to turn off clipping was necessary but it came with a price. Few pilots had ever experienced no-clip mode, and while a few admitted to a sudden sense of exhilaration as they were liberated from the cruel physics of aviation -- most were anxious, even terrified. When asked why, one reacted with astonishment, almost anger. "Well shit, we're pilots. Avoiding things is just what we do. It's a trained response to avoid things. And it did not help at all when a few assholes broke formation and started to buzz through other airplanes. Every one of us was thinking, they're going to turn clipping on sooner or later, I hope it happens after this jerk gets off my ass."
Others who requested not to be identified had other stories. "We began in formation then matched vector, then merged completely. I mean really merged. The passengers were really startled those from other planes floated into view and entered the cabin. Then someone started laughing, probably in sheer terror, but soon everyone was laughing and it was great fun. Isn't it funny how when something scary doesn't kill you immediately, you want to laugh? Isn't it?" After a moment he laughed suddenly.
Collision alarms were not designed for no-clip and many were sounding constantly and could be heard clearly as pilots spoke over the radio channel. To make matters worse, the effect of no-clip was not confined to aircraft or the facilities. One pilot on approach noted "I almost swerved instinctively to avoid a fire truck sailing past, it must have floated off a ramp in the upper garage but there it was right in the approach path. Then this guy -- a businessman clutching a briefcase -- appeared and stopped in midair. He was flapping around like a butterfly, obviously pleased with himself for sailing through the glass of the upper lounge and out into the field. Then he turned slowly and there was this 200 ton aircraft bearing down on him. Like a stupid squirrel he fled directly down the flight path, glancing back. The look on his face as he passed through the cockpit was priceless."
Landing was extremely difficult during this period. "Impossible, actually. In no-clip you're not really landing on anything, just trying to stop descending when you THINK you're on the ground. Fortunately there was no stall physics in play so we took it slow and I had the co-pilot hanging out the window trying to gauge the moment the wheels reached the ground. The plane in front of me was obviously waiting for touchdown, he just sunk into the tarmac and disappeared. I hear he drifted around under the airport for awhile and finally rose into a parking lot. They had to knock down fences to get it towed back to the field."
i haven't used an Apple product since the 90's but weren't Apple computers the first to hide the extension and instead differentiate in the icon only?
The last Apple I used was a Lisa so take this with a grain of salt. Well, a few minutes here and there on various Macs...
In DOS where the extension determine what it should be ... or unix where a few bytes at the beginning of the file had better fit some 'Magic' pattern it knows... the OS's involvement ends with name, basic attribute flags and timestamps, the file itself is a single blob of data or code (don't know which 'till you try to parse into it) ...
Apple decided to do differently. In HFS each file object consists of a primary name that you see, but also a type code that served the same purpose as the file extension. These codes were assigned and strictly maintained by Apple to avoid collisions. So the type info used by the OS was not merely hidden, it was separately maintained and you could only 'patch' a file's type with special utilities. So you weren't just plopping files and driving off, the proper type code had to be installed along with it.
The HFS file record also led to a 'data fork' which contained the blob of the file itself. But also a Resource Fork that is a little structured database maintained by MacOS. If you're Windows-oriented think of it as a little slice of Registry stored alongside the file. Like the Registry, MacOS maintains the resource fork, you can only access it via queries and commands. It was a convenient place to drop application-specific information (even local memory swap I think) and some resource forks could grow large.
So when it came time to share a file, Windows and unix people were just emailing it to one another over the newly formed Arpanet Inter-Network, which was built with pistons and valves and old brass speaking tubes, it made this delightful hiss as your data was transmitted... they were just exchanging a data glob with a name and sometimes an extension.
But some Apple apps needed extra baggage to transmit and receive a single document, which when it arrived in DOS could take form of a folder whose name was vaguely derived from the file name (remember Apple used long names and DOS did not) and two subfolders DATA and RSRC that contained a parseable resource database where you'd wind the file's full name, its magic type code and stuff. One popular method of reducing this to a single file was the Stuffit archive+compression format. There were lots of third-party apps to help Windows and Mac communicate and make sense of these file formats. Mac OS X is more unixy.
What ease of use? it provides them with no more knowledge and doesn't make a web page any easier to use, if they don't understand a URL they are already not typing it or touching it. Hiding it just ensures further ignorance for no benefit.
Hah. Like Microsoft deciding that file name dot-extensions were the devil's workshop and must be hidden from view by default. So people did not learn them, and became vulnerable to whole new classes of malware attack and needless confusion, especially when sharing files.
Whenever I set up a new Windows showing file extensions and showing full path in address bar was the first change I'd make. Turn on URL address bars (some OEMs turned them off!), status lines, full detail everything. And people learned how their folders were organized and how to recognize malevolent attachments because I'd tell them they should learn extensions and look out for weird names, only the last one counts. When they reinstalled Windows they'd call and say "Hey! Windows is screwed up, I'm not seeing the full file name." Now they were savvy enough I could tell them where to find those options over the phone. They demanded full disclosure, nothing less.
And thus, the great circle of nerd is complete.
Deliberately hiding details because they confuse people is not a solid reason for turning everything into its fisher price equivalent.
Hah. The other day a friend showed me his Android phone. The screen was black, in the middle there was this dumb looking LEGO robot lying on its back, something like this. "You're the computer whiz. What does this mean?" I looked at it for a moment, jabbed my finger repeatedly on the unresponsive little screen that has no buttons like a bird bumping against a window.
Then I said,
"It appears that clever engineers have managed to make a full color megapixel display that is capable of showing a whole chapter of text say absolutely NOTHING. The machine knows something is wrong, that's why it retrieved the image and is showing it. It knows what it was trying to do, what did not work as expected. There are details and helpful hints inside, but they decided that you wanted to see this dumb robot instead. These people are messing with your mind. They think you are stupid. They think you are easily confused and need to see a picture of a robot and a red triangle when something goes wrong. They don't trust you with details. They don't think you can handle the truth. And you know what? When you call them the person you speak to will probably not know any more than I do, they'll tell you to push some secret reset button and hope for the best. Well here's what you have to do. But does it show a diagram indicating where the reset button is? No, you're supposed to look at a dead robot carcass instead. Because you're nothing to them.
You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
While I was saying all of this, the robot disappeared and the phone rebooted.
People don't ask me for computer help much any more.
Do people here really know that when they mod for false reasons, they're breaking the rules?
Just wondering.
You did a fine job. They are not aware that they are modding for false reasons, they just think you're crazy, welcome to the club. And they haven't read enough on the subject.
The Greenhouse Effect page at Wikipedia doesn't help much here. It canonizes Fourier as the effect's founding father but fails to mention -- as you have correctly tried to point out -- that he carried out experiments with 'real greenhouse' apparatus with a physical barrier, (correctly) identified convection as the heating mechanism yet also (incorrectly) envisioned there might be an atmospheric phenomenon that also acted as a true barrier. To discover this you must visit Fourier's own page and see that "Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes."
So to them there is only one Greenhouse Effect and your definition does not fit, so it's a 'taking the Lord's name in vain' kinda thing.
Fourier deserves no ire for this disproved hypothesis, though it does present a challenge to modern editors and mules of consensus: there are two Greenhouse Effects. To honor Dr. Seuss we'll call them Thing One (Fourier's greenhouse) and Thing Two (the re-radiation explanation).
Once upon a time in the dark age of science, January 24, 2005, the Greenhouse Effect Wiki page was short and sweet. Thing One and Thing Two had equal billing in the introduction, although Thing Two "is a matter of some dispute". Then a section "The natural greenhouse effect" which actually described Thing Two and a section "Real greenhouses" for Thing One.
But the "Real Greenhouses" section is undergoing revision. here is the first round of edits and the page as it was then. It features a link to the provocative page Bad Greenhouse which dismisses the term re-radiation as 'nonsense' from a thermodynamical viewpoint and other Crazy Talk.
The Wikipedia discussion pages of these and subsequent edits are interesting and read like a heated Slashdot discussion (on a good day): Talk2, Talk3, Talk4, Talk5, Talk6. Some even wanted to abolish Thing One, or re-state both as 'conflicting' hypotheses. When the dust clears Thing One must describe the greenhouse for which it was named. And it would be really embarrassing to admit in the 21st century that we don't know how a greenhouse works.
All in all I'm pretty comfortable with Wikipedia's definition of Thing One. Thing Two I still consider to be -- as the Wiki page said back in 2005, "a matter of some dispute". CO2 is rising sharply and temp not so much or at all, depending where you look, and how closely you examine the 'adjustments' that have been made. And there are mechanisms unexplored as I've pointed out in other threads ... but as yet these are cautious days for science. People are crowing and squawking about almost-infinitesimal delta in a very complex system.
Joseph Fourier may have nailed Thing One and only glimpsed Thing Two but he really knew his way around noise and how sligh
Maybe by making executions much more visceral we'll be less inclined to make them clean and clinical and stop thinking about them as clean and clinical.
You nailed it. There are two evils here.
The first evil is that the taking of life is necessary. I personally believe this is a necessary evil, there should be such a thing as a 'capital crime', one for which death is the sentence. By no means should it be a fast track slam dunk from conviction to execution. People make mistakes and there must be time and opportunity to appeal, for new evidence or suppressed evidence to come to light.
To anyone who might think that life in prison without chance of parole is an acceptable alternative to execution, I beg you to try to distinguish it from human torture and slavery and ask yourself ... which is more enlightened: an eye-for-an-eye society in which the sentence is compatible with the crime ... or one that places human beings in bare concrete zoos for life? It is a tough question and I'm glad to see some thoughtful answers, especially those with opinions that differ from my own.
The second and more insidious evil is whitewashing the act of execution in ways that make it seem more 'palatable' or 'executioner-friendly'. Replacing the firing squad with a needle is just the lame substitution of one horror for another. What does that say about us? No, I do not believe it is of any value for the accused to suffer or be conscious of the throes of death once the moment arrives.
Dispense with the drugs, the gasses, the electricity, even the rope-hangin'. Drugs and electricity are heinous because due to human physiology they are unable to accurately deliver a precise and unequivocal moment of death. Hanging is particularly heinous, it is merely a form of beheading where the brain is guaranteed seconds of torment. I say we can dispense with that.
By all means use technology. Bring back the firing squad: multiple large caliber guns directed by computer software that targets the head and neck. The usual multiple enable buttons that seem to help several executioners sleep better at night (but why I'm not sure). Then a random delay, then the guns electrically fire in unison so the bullets arrive before the sound. No pain or even cognition for the accused, but lots of mess.
For the families of the condemned -- every funeral is a closed casket funeral. No amount of cosmetic surgery will re-create that peaceful, angelic innocent face lying in the casket, arms folded, that invites denial and confirmation bias.
And use Google Glass facial recognition software for the firing squad guns. I love Google but I also like to rattle their cages.
Hello lamppost, whatcha knowin? I've come to watch your flowers growin
Ain't you got no ryhmes for me? Doo doo doo doo, feelin' groovy~
You beat me to it, you insensitive clod!
At least I get to supply the link: HELLO LAMPOST
Forget the talking lampposts and Wifi enabled potholes. Although it would be cool if traffic lights broadcast riddles and puzzles, awarding an immediate green light to the first driver to solve it.
My idea for a Smart City would be to re-vamp and modernize the CB radio concept, every vehicle would have a short range hands-free digital two way radio so drivers could speak to other drivers in close proximity: you could make general comments to all or incline your head towards a particular car and send a more private message. With a certain gesture after a reply was received, the system could 'lock' the connection so you could continue the conversation even after you leave the zone.
It's easy to see this as an absurd novelty that would be used to pass on road rage... and there would be a shake-down period in which that may be its most common use... but thinking past that I find a lot of promise in the idea. Pedestrians could join in. Cafes or other buildings could have a corner in which one could hear road-talk, or even participate. Little billboards would soon pop up, like a new era of Burma-Shave, that try to suggest topics or invite a response.
In other words, the Smartest thing to do is not award some sweetheart contract to a tech firm to 'redesign' the city at all. Don't mess with the damned city. Use technology to find new ways for the people in the city to communicate with one another. Every time we develop new technology that allows strangers with mutual interests to meet who would not otherwise meet (such as academia or the Internet) we take human evolution up a notch.
The only Smart City that I'd really want to live in would be one where all the buildings and road signs were on hydraulic struts, and everything bobs and dances like Toon Town.
A modern Richard Guindon cartoon that best represents this Slashdot story ... an urban legend ... [1998, archived] essay on teachers' and students' increasingly virtual role in a tech society ... a mad hunt for the original 1963 New Yorker cartoon that started it all ... and an ugly mouse squeak toy.
Solar, Water, Wind are all completely renewable sources of energy that upon failure...don't destroy the ecosystem around it.
Friend, please take a look at my mini-essay Electricity in the Time of Cholera.
We're talking about 7 billion people here. We all want access to clean water, sanitation, washing machines and electric lights. Half of the women in the world today wash clothes by hand. In rural areas 7 of 8 Africans, half of all South Asians, in total an estimated 1.5 billion people lack access to electricity.
What is the combined ecological impact of 1.5 billion rural people living without hope of electrification? They're burning charcoal, inviting short-sighted development practices. Embracing coal mining. Speaking of the United States, if we had not embarked on a massive endeavor to electrify rural areas in the 20th century a large area of our South and Midwest would still be without clean drinking water.
Never mind Water unless you live next to an un-dammed river whose inhabitants would love to be swallowed by a lake, and some powerful distant city has plans for the water, too. Will Solar and Wind deliver electricity to these people... or to anyone? Every time I see a windmill I imagine it as it will look like in 5 years, rusted and frozen. This is farming country, there are quite a few around and none are spinning, guess the cost of operation caught up. Every time I see a photo of a solar panel and hear talk of how it's made of common sand and we should be replicating them by the billions I think of the megatons of silicon tetrachloride that need to be dumped somewhere for this to happen. And the little elves who would wire them together out in the elements with ten pounds of electronics to make megawatts. During the day. And for watt? No real watts to speak of. NO ONE can afford PV and Wind because it will NOT run a water treatment plant for your local school let alone millions of people 24/7. Period. They are simply 'off the table'.
Nuclear energy -- even from water reactors as it has been produced in North America and Europe -- is the cleanest, safest viable form of energy on the table. But with the Molten Salt Reactor we have the opportunity to take it to greater levels, without the risks of nuclear energy that are most terrifying. Electricity is a centralized industrial-scale process and must stay that way. The math does not work otherwise.
If we do not revitalize our grid get or on track with an acceptable new source of base load energy that could transform the world, end the age of steam and fossil fuel... we could lose it all, you know.
___
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
I'm afraid I don't see how 3D printing brings any benefit here - a laser cutter or CNC machine fed with durable, stabilized sheets of plastic would be faster and produce *far* more durable pages.
Of course you're right. Etching by laser on solid sheets of plastic or slow-corrosion metal is the thing. Just desperately trying to come up with ways in which 3D printing might be useful to salvage the time I've spent reading about it. Never mind all the time others have spent trying to make it work.
If you want to place a barrier between knowledge levels, call them 'magnification-stops' in your approach where certain technology and knowledge obtained by the years like 1700, 1800, 1900, 1950, 2000 is encoded with successive difficulty --- then if history is any clue you're best bet is to change medium and method at each stop.
Optics for example. The advancement from a lens allowing the eye to discern Mars clearly to one able to construct a great microscope may be an accident of local geology, quartz and silica, or a single individual's experiments in glass manufacture. There could even be an alternate history where mercury in spinning dishes is optics. You have a clean progression to 100x magnification with a single stage, then it takes compound lenses and take it to 1000x You can push it a little further by using filters to reduce the color component, but you hit the wall of visible light.
Now to break that Reading Rainbow 800-1000x barrier we're in the realm of coherent photons using lasers to 'read' (project and reflect through optics) or scatter (holography). And further on into using streams of electrons where the only usable means optick is electromagnetism shaped by precisely wound coils and some gruesome electronics.
Could there be a single object that is an Easy Reader through all possible optical resolutions, but also incorporates successive levels, the greatest of which is only readable with electrons? That is a challenge but do-able since you can read through things with electrons. The visible stages act as protection for this fragile inner layer.
Perhaps for the intermediate stages requiring laser technology the colorful yet color-challenged field of 2 dimensional holography might offer a solution... something that resembles Asimov's Prime Radiant without the computey stuff, where a coherent beam of laser light will scatter off of foil and project material onto the wall, and precise movement of the object or the beam will 'scroll'.
This being Slashdot, I have to suggest that at some point the Thing will might digital, where we apply leverage to Hamming and Huffman for encoding and error correction... BUT now the content is sub-coded in a series of arbitrary choices that represent our evolution of information technology... and not necessarily anyone else's. To one familiar with the optick perusal of language-symbols, going digital, which we've done gradually -- to those who have only our Prime Radiant as a guide -- it would be a wall of incomprehensibility that would take time to crack.
I just had this idea that at some low resolution text might offer a delicious recipe for Taco Sauce, and a tiny dollop of this concoction makes its way into a tiny space between the letters... completely obliterating the 13th century.
Completely losing the 13th century has happened before. The circumstances surrounding its disappearance (but not its present whereabouts) can be seen here in the brief clip from the 1975 movie "R
Walk yourself through the steps, support structure and equipment that would be required to pull that off balanced against the likelihood of getting caught. Then you might sleep better. Evil ones tend to choose easier paths.
"Hello --- Doc --- I'm having trouble getting to sleep lately. The sheep are wearing strange equipment, some carry rolls of blueprints in their mouth. But the most bizarre thing is, they're counting down not up. I tried flipping my mattress over but I just wound up underneath it. What should I do??"
But more seriously, what we have here is a reminder that Insider threats are the most serious challenge confronting ___________ in today's world, Captain Obvious says. This modern post-9/11 genre has its roots in the classical Reader's Digest series Hints From Heloise, in which a calm trusted voice would soothe troubled housewives with too much time on their hands by suggesting tiny improvements and shortcuts like cutting empty bleach bottles into new, functional shapes and experimenting with food. Don't just think outside the box, why not cut the front off the boxes, paint them with cheerful latex colors and stack them in the closet to organize shoes. Occasionally something insightful and amazing has arisen from it such as the triple-Decker grill cheese sandwich.
But more seriously, the Stanford Scholars are capitalizing on the general condition of the times, camping out at the triple-Decker sandwich where Hints from Heloise, Safety Culture and the Security Culture meet. They are paving a new lecture circuit. And (if you skim down TA) Obviously a series of "don't assume" posters. Dilbert's boss has the whole set. Some are hung upside down.
Go to Vegas and ask anyone who makes 100k+ a year doing security what works and they'll tell you that a general, intelligent sense of situational awareness is best. Let your people watch lots of people so they can learn to read people. A set of SIMPLE guidelines and procedures to follow, the freedom to share suspicious with superiors with confidentiality and without prejudice and you're done. You've assembled the best security machine possible.
But that should be obvious too.
I believe that there is a move afoot to capitalize on the post-Fukushima radiation fear as applied to operating nuclear power plants, in the same way that there was a dirty bomb rad-fad some years past. And yes, some of the threat is coming from within. I speak of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent 'shocking' news item "Uneven enforcement suspected at nuclear plants which was covered here at Slashdot. Where an organization charged with security oversight stoops to insinuation and fear-mongering in the press even though doing so is an admission of incompetence. I am forced to conclude that some useless eaters have invaded the Security and Safety cultures. On that I have already spoken my piece. Warning: severe tire damage.
___
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
Friend, you should condense your post a bit and submit it as a topic on its own: "Ask Slashdot: What form could the best modern Rosetta Stone take?" Rosetta not just for language cross-translation of course, but the general idea of knowledge preservation.
Something like HD-rosetta "microfiche tablets" are also an option, though you have to keep in mind the level of technology necessary to read the engraving at the desired scale.
Reading this I think immediately of 3D printing technology. So far I have seen a few great uses for it, such as the printing of replacement parts necessary to keep something running or to fashion the unique precise shapes to replace body parts... and so many not-so-great or BLAH uses such as soap dishes, uncomfortable weird-looking chairs or (my un-favorite) guns that will some day explode in yer face because those 'casual' 3D printed molecular bonds are just not up to the challenge.
But a 3D printed book with pages of stable plastic and holes that are letters could still be be like-new and readable in 1000 years, if stored properly. It's DO-ABLE.
Hocus's Whats-The-Use Law of knowledge preservation:
When civilization is simple, the useful laws of nature are so damned obvious that no one wastes their time carving them in stone, so all you may read from that era is silly political fluff about kings and wars.
When civilization is complicated and knowledge immense, despite advances in technology no one bothers to create textbooks that might last more than 30 years because what's the use, at the end of that period they might be *slightly* incorrect. There's no viable business model for knowledge preservation that pays off in the short term. Most people are too distracted to sift through the noise to gather and present essential knowledge. Those few who do have the time are typically unable to produce a viable product (which is where 3D printing comes in).
So raw science data is DOOMED and WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE.
I go for your Rosetta stone at successive levels of magnification, though each level should be a separate object. Books you can read directly will be handed around casually, while 100x and 1000x texts must be carefully stored.
But there should be texts printed in all resolutions. In some hypothetical future dark age, nothing would jump-start the re-invention of precision optics faster than showing them a continuous spiral of text that recedes into optical "invisibility".
I think the boom stuff (gunpowder and runaway nuclear fission) should be represented on all levels with the benefits and hazards clearly indicated, because you do not want to encourage the formation of secret societies and tyrants who confiscate microscopes and go around to destroy all high resolution copies (except their own) to keep some temporary strategic advantage. Dynamite has helped us to build more infrastructure than it has destroyed. Far more nuclear fission has been released to keep us warm in Winter than to take human life. The more people aware of these possibilities the better tha chance that we will make the right decisions. If every classic civilization had run their own Alexandria Library and traded copies freely with it, so much more history would be available today.
I look forward an Ask Slashdot on the topic that explores it better than the one last June where the Whats The Use doom sayers seemed to defend the court against new ideas.
IMO, CP/M should get him the award, not even considering BIOS...
While Tandy TRS-DOS was my first OS, CP/M on Vector Graphic, Kaypro and Televideo systems was the first one I dove into. In the BDOS I could disassemble memory to instructions and actually figure out what was going on. CP/M was the 8-bit bread and butter of the 8080/Z80 age.
In 1980 at age 16 I wrote a proof of concept product, a TSR (terminate and stay resident') program for CP/M systems called DataCrypt. You'd load it on startup and be prompted for a pass phrase and it would hash the phrase, tuck itself into ~2k above your COMMAND.COM and terminate-resident, intercepting file I/O. When any running program created or opened a file matching one of several (user-settable) wildcard patterns such as $$??????.???, it would perform transparent crypt or de-crypt of each 128-byte sector.
So with DataCrypt resident you could use WordStar and work with a mix of encrypted and unencrypted documents. If the program used your primary name with a special extension (like *.$$$) for temporary files even those would be encrypted on disk.
I sent it out to several folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere for review but got no bites. At the time there were few computer folk as interested in data security as I was. But even then I was aware that TRUE security was a long distance away. The prototype's CRC32/XOR snake oil encryption had only 32 bits of entropy, which is a wink and a chuckle these days. True DES encryption would have been a slow deal.
We'd call 'em overlays.
One project I did, a series of mods c.1981 to bring real POS invoicing to an early version of Peachtree Accounting, was a BEAR. It was written in MBASIC running under CP/M -- Interpreted tokenized BASIC running on a machine that started with a 64k transient program area. No extended memory then!
Minus OS call kernel, COMMAND.COM, minus BASIC interpreter, your program was born with ~32k to use in its lifetime. So 32k minus the size of the program itself left you with a memory heap for variables. The heap grew downward with every string assignment and when it bumped into the code there would be this pause for "garbage collection" while the heap was de-fragged and re-written to the top of memory again.
No comments, too much room! No long var names! You'd use CHAIN to jump to another program leaving vars in memory. But if you your were clever you'd carve out line number ranges and place temporary functions into 'overlays' that loaded over existing portions. When you did a MERGE no p-code optimization or block was going on here, any load command did its work line by line, it was like a really fast monkey typing in the program code.
So in place of Peachtree's default invoice which was clunky and required lots of input steps (mostly useless for cash sales) to implement a streamlined invoice was difficult. They use lots of strings. My first attempt worked great --- but every couple of line items the heap would touch and trigger global garbage collection -- ~3 to 5 seconds where the machine would be unresponsive. In those THREADLESS 8-bit days when garbage collection began your keyboard controller would save ONE keystroke but the rest would be LOST. This is a total wash. Clearly it needed a whole re-write.
The only way I could make the entry portion useable was to throw out the programming concepts that made things 'easy' (yet caused heap movement). Don't assemble a string of spaces, use a loop to emit them one CHR$() at a time. Don't assign to strings, pre-allocate a number of strings of reasonable length and use MID$() to replace its contents, keep a separate string length var so you can only emit the portion of the string that was being used.
It was sorta like coding in C, in BASIC. That was kind of a 'door' problem. But it worked. Then the world went CBASIC and all our problems magically vanished.
I tend to side with the pragmatic individuals here who are saying, it's bad enough that our modern historical record lacks the fine grain of Matthew Brady's silver emulsion plates and are generally USELESS for blow-ups of large groups of humans standing in groups --- "Mommy why does granny look like my LEGO people?"
In order to preserve what vibrant detail can be captured and push focus tricks into post-production where they belong, how about this,
A stereo multi-megapixel camera, where a second ccd+lens is on an outrigger that stores against the body but can be slid or swung out to human eye separation or better. It would click into position parallel with the main lens, but could also swivel outward and click precisely ~30,45 degrees out, so you could more easily build stitchable panoramas.
The operating modes:
1. Ultimate 3D HQ stereo photographs where the max resolution of both lenses is committed to memory, for panorama stitching or delaying 3D parallax calcs to post processing.
2. A series of more economical 2.5D modes from high to low resolution where a single photo is captured into memory --- but also --- a separate grey channel is saved, which is built by calculating parallax displacement of the pictures arriving from the lenses to the best of the camera's ability at max internal resolution, a smooth overlay that ranges from black=none=distant to nearby=white=close.
Your separate grey parallax channel saved in the 2.5 modes arrives into Photoshop ready to serve as a range selection mask so you can do these evil information-destroying transforms to your heart's content -- based on 'true' depth information.
'Designer' Drones
'Ubiquitous' Babies
or combine. Anything folded into the cause of 'good parenting', however tenuous, puts it off-limits culturally,
Drone Baby Monitor
Baby's First Drone
Marketing tags revisited,
1950s: Drone-A-Tron, Atomic Baby
1970s: 'Euro' Drones, 'Euro' Babies
1980s: Power Drones, Power Babies
1990s: My Little Drone, My Little Baby
2000s: Green Drones, Carbon Neutral Babies
2010s: 'Flava' Drones, Organic Babies
Perhaps Americans are uncomfortable these days generally. Was there an adequate control? Did Pew select a group to not ask any questions at all, just stare silently to observe for signs of fidgeting or restlessness?
Should
Comcast be allowed to
Control both what
Content you
Consume and how you get to
Consume it?"
'C' is for COOKIE that's good enough for me!
As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more,
There is no single LFTR concept. When you say there is no separate blanket you seem to be describing a one-fluid design. Weinberg's MSRE was never intended as such, it was a first stage in the development of a two-fluid Thorium breeder where a separate loop of fertile Thorium within the core breeds. The two-fluid design was envisioned by Weinberg as a best-fit solution to the management of long term waste products. I believe this is still true today.
When we scale massive I think a ~300 year waste storage is doable and worth doing.
Is that LFTR operating temperature of 700 C supposed to be a scare-figure? Are we comparing a fluid fuel technology that achieves its negative temperature coefficient of reactivity from its inherent design, where the heat-density variation of the fissile maintains this equilibrium -- with a water reactor model where sudden loss of coolant invites solid fuel temperatures to rise to 2200 C under explosive runaway conditions? Now that's a scare-figure.
The folks maintaining our water reactors have done a professional and stellar job to keep the water flowing all these years. I think it's time they deserve a break.
David LeBlanc gave a great little lecture on LFTR design topics at TEAC3 outlining the one vs. two fluid approach. In it he alludes to what LFTR designers call "the plumbing problem", in which ORNL's two-fluid design with its multiple tubes of fertile and fissile through the core promised to be a daunting challenge of engineering, thermal expansion at the various barriers being a wildcard that may affect the stable temperature coefficient they were striving for.
So LeBlanc has continued Weinberg's work by simplifying -- he envisions a "single tube within a tube" design where the ORNL's short and squat reactor with its many tubes in core becomes taller and thinner with a single barrier between fertile and fissile. If those illustrations leave you wanting more, here is a 2011 whitepaper that covers its advantages.
ORNL all but abandoned work on two fluids after Weinberg's time in what I see as a series of compromises where diminishing budget, increasing proliferation concern and (I'm being a bit brutal) obviously less concern about single fluid long-term waste products. Or (less brutal) perhaps they have an optimistic view that as we push into it we will become far more adept with transuranics.
In addition to a refined two-fluid design, LeBlanc is covering all the bases. He took the stage again in TEAC5 to promote the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor, which he hopes may be a 'best-fit LFTR' for now.
The problem is that so many things that seem to be best fits turn out to be compromises that entrench themselves, as have water reactors. My personal sympathies are with Kirk Sorensen in his quest to realize Weinberg's two-fluid LFTR idea with its LOW ~300 year waste impact -- I believe it may be a best-fit for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
Until sustainable scalable fusion arrives
No "they" didn't have a LFTR reactor working in the 70s. Nobody's EVER had an LFTR working. There is no liquid-fluorine thorium Santa Claus, just a lot of grad student Powerpoint presentations.
Thank you for calling the Thorium hotline. YES THERE IS A THORIUM SANTA CLAUS! I've ridden on his sleigh, he even let me ring the jingle bells. Even if you are a sourpuss you are welcome to come along for a ride too: the Thorium Remix 2011. It's two hours long so bring some snacks.
I grew up amid Cold War fear and graduated to fossil fuel angst, coal concern. Then over the years I have witnessed a parade of 'renewable' wind and solar energy farm dreams where an absurd complexity of grid interconnect, tiny yields and moveable parts scales up to power -- a medieval society, maybe. A bad dream we should do the math and awaken from. So I resolved that our future should be nuclear... because modern civilization followed me home and I decided to keep it.
So it was with astonished relief that I learned that there was more than one way to do nuclear.
Dr. Alvin Weinberg PhD, one of the original patent holders of the Light Water reactor was slightly more than a graduate student. He was so obsessed with the idea that liquid fuels delivered greater safety and scalability, he sacrificed the remainder of his career in a vain attempt to convince the Navy (Rickover was running the show) to pursue liquid fuel and then, brazenly, went directly to the public -- a prominent scientist of the Atoms For Peace program warning about safety issues of water reactors was very embarassing. He soon lost the battle and his position as director at Oak Ridge.
I'm no diplomat apologist. I am pissed off by Admiral Rickover's lack of forward vision in 1973. With one phone call he could have prevented Weinberg's dismissal, preserved molten salt research and set human kind on a much better course.
There was a molten-salt reactor, a laboratory-scale device fuelled with U-233 and later U-235 in intermittent operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratories for a few years in the 1960s. It never used thorium and wouldn't have been any good if it had because it couldn't breed thorium up into U-233 to fission for energy.
Because the plumbing and the scale was wrong. They did not put a Thorium blanket around the test reactor because they already knew that Thorium breeding would work, and wanted direct access to the core to make neutron measurements. The ARE and MSRE were projects to prove that the chemistry could achieve criticality and remain stable... also refine the engineering.
In terms of ground covered between theory and finished commercial product, the 1965-1969 MSRE was an masterpiece 'hack' of high-tech (more chemistry than nuclear engineers were accustomed to) -- and low-tech (salt plug drain), delivered.
Anyone in any industry who makes such progress with a single experiment in so little time should feel rightfully proud.
There are also experiments going on to see how thorium works in regular light-water reactors. The physics says it will work, it's not as energetic as regular uranium fuels though. Baby steps baby steps.
Thorium as solid fuel in water reactors is 'several hundred years doomed' commercially. Uranium works better as a solid fuel and will not be scarce for awhile.
In regards to LFTR I respectfully think it's time to take big steps, big steps. As concerted an effort as those steps on the moon.
Corrosion schmoesion. We're not talking safety issues here in a system that carries high pressure, inherent steam and hydrogen explosion risk. LFTR will be just a bunch of standard bolt-together plumbing at normal atmospheric pressure. Replace and recycle everything every ten years until the corrosion issues ar
You think that a commercial scale Thorium reactor could be developed and built for $4B?
Yes.
Because fusion is hard,
and LFTR is easy.
Comparatively speaking.
The second one would cost half as much. The 20th one might cost as much as an airplane.
And using closed cycle Brayton it could be sited anywhere, even far away from a major source of water. And as far away from people, who tend to congregate around water, as desired.
The present regulatory apparatus, which is wholly oriented to a solid fuel water reactor technology that carries risk of decay heat meltdown, steam and hydrogen explosion, large scale venting of radioactivity -- needs to be reevaluated and adjusted rationally for this technology -- which carries none of these risks.
With due and fond respect for the things that helped us become civilized people... it is time to end the age of steam and fossil fuel.
___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
This is not a rant on bioengineering per se. Humans deliberately producing Things with desirable traits is as old as rain. But when I see folks attempting to leverage marginally successful processes into solutions to Big Problems by reducing the margins... I have to take a step backwards to glimpse more of the picture.
If you are going to involve 'new' plants (or animals) in the production of energy, pause to think.
1. Energy required by humans is a monster growing exponentially. This monster EATS. This is inevitable. If you only have 1.3 children, someone else will have 4.3, if you conserve, they won't. Enforcement leads to conflict, escalation and war, the biggest energy waster of them all. So Big Problems must be eliminated, not achieved by legislation and (imagined) compliance.
2. The most cherished notions of sustainability and conservation involve taking a snapshot -- preserving Gaia as it exists today. In other words we are not obsessed with creating new forms of life because we are bored with the old ones. Though fluorescing pigs are really cool. Every little push for biofuels, even given 4x improvement in process efficiency, directly feeds the monster and his appetite is increasing too quickly.
(Such as the ongoing advance of the great Human Palm Oil Desert across Asia. This phenomenon permits Europeans to obtain diesel fuel and maintain their small tracts of land in pristine state, while the devastation wrought by Palm Oil monoculture remains comfortably distant.)
There is NO such thing as a sustainable biological source of energy on the scales we do and will consume it. Period. Advocates of biofuels imagine happy farmers that would be glad to drop what they are doing and make fuel inefficiently. And unused tracts of land, such as Brooklyn, in which these massive bio-chemical endeavors would reside. This is fantasy. There are only large scale Unintended Consequences down this path. And every corner of the Earth is now claimed and defended by people who would rather keep it as it is -- biologically.
3. There is only ONE source of energy that could scale quickly to power the grid, leaving hydrocarbons for fuel and chemical precursors (plastic, fertilizer) until their clean replacements arise. And eventually through separation of hydrogen from water and nitrogen from air, those too.
It's nuclear, and more specifically liquid fuel reactors.
4. Instead of BADLY transforming our biosphere with yet more engineered plant monocultures -- and if you thought food was intrusive wait 'till you run the numbers on energy -- energy production needs to become limitless, small, efficient, self contained, safe and clean.
Wouldn't you rather plant roses?
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Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate