Okay so these thingies will be able to print anything, so what would the economy be like? Well you'd download the latest template from the Internet and when you start to print your printer says, "GLOP OUT". So you go down to your local GLOP POD store and purchase the glop pods you need. Because the Starter Pod that came with your printer was only 30% full (joke's on you!).
There are glop pods for EVERYTHING. Almost-metal, almost-plastic, almost-wood... items manufactured with these bear an uncanny resemblance to the materials for which they are named, but manage to have no redeeming materials-strength or durability advantages to the originals. But you made it yourself. And it only consumed half the GLOP POD. But they're cheaper by the dozen.
And the food! There are three types of glop food pods available: Strawberry, Broccoli and Steak. Oops, I just printed a shoe out of Steak! Ha ha. I just printed a plastic hamburger!
Why do I get the impression that hundreds of years of applied materials science, chemistry and the economy of scale in manufacturing 'durable' goods, is being frivolously marginalized, and that the folks who are most excited are those who envision themselves running a GLOP POD store?
I would use a 3D printer to construct simple, rectangular stackable enclosures in which I would re-mount the electronic innards of my routers, external hard disks and modems, to replace the oogly rounded ugly non-stackable JUNK plastic art deco shapes that are produced today that look like stupid alien egg sacs.
1. Please continue. 2. The experiment requires that you continue. 3, It is absolutely essential that you continue. 4. You have no other choice, you must go on.
I have programmed my talking alarm clock to say this. Strong coffee with the consistency of pudding also helps. The experiment goes ever on and on.
But a least it gives some arguments for a compationate God, since s/he does not smite them in anger for keeping on telling him, her, it how to do its job...
That sentence blew the personal pronoun component of my cognitive language corpus straight out the side of my head. Two hose clamps and some duct tape later, I think it's still leaking.
You might want to bone up on the Wiki entries for Personal Pronoun, the Gender Specific Pronoun, Gender Neutral and Cult of Androgyny. Once you make your way through all that you'll know why gentlemen of refined wit and impeccable manners refrain from making remarks to anyone. About anything. We just stare and drool.
infrastructure gobbles up a lot of money and its maintenance (or lack thereof) is a major issue in this country
You've nailed it. Infrastructure has become invisible, unlauded, boring. Infrastructure is the original stuff that matters.
Aside from entering some engineering field, there are ways that nerds can make a difference. Take this dam for example, clearly a certain level of routine surveillance had not been performed . If divers discover a 2 inch crack, could there have been a half inch or hairline crack some time ago? And could a more thorough use of remote imaging or even acoustic technology have spotted it? What if someone who reads Slashdot has an idea for some economical and effective way to inspect dams should contact Thomas Stredwick at PUD and offer expertise and propose such a method? At times history favors those who make those phone calls.
I define a 'nerd' as someone technologically aware who is capable, by the multidisciplinary nature of technology, of useful insight. The biggest problem with nerd-culture today in my opinion is that they tend to be observers who are not out there looking for problems to solve.
If you consider yourself to be tech-savvy in some field or are just interested in what problems are out there, check out the InnoCentive Challenges. These are a collection of problems to solve, big and little, that someone has documented and put up cash money to solve. Some of the challenges are interesting and very specific. For example, if you can propose a good way to Detect Protruding Nails in a Wooden Pallet that is going past on a conveyor belt, there might be $20,000 in it for you. Also lots of chemistry, medical materials science challenges.
Infrastructure should be a part of your child's exploration of the modern world. Underground by David Macaulay gives readers an introduction to utilities by presenting awesome ink drawings of incredible perspective and detail. As they start reading. Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape is the kind of book you want your children to grow up with and browse long before they understand all the words. Because great books about interesting things deliver the words to them.
Replacement stinkbugs have been ordered and are on their way up through Florida's major I-95 and I-75 corridors. Thank you for selecting the two-day shipping option.
Add $5.75 to your order to qualify for free shipping, with your trial of Amazon Prime. With your Prime subscription your orders may qualify for additional bonus items such as 3, 5 and 7 year Cicadas and Party Fun Paks of dark crusty bastard fungus that will cover and consume everything.
A copy of this order has been sent to your email address but the stinkbugs will probably arrive first.
Project 'A' 1. scan/digitize and 'snap' maps to geo coords and add markup 2. create website using active server scripts and HTML/js for drag/zoom navigation 3. release to the world with great fanfare 4. site is slashdotted, then eventually settles down to several terabytes/mo bandwidth 5. one year in, site is on the radar of cost/benefit analysis as an escalating expense 6. two years in, routine site changes break the atlas with few to mourn it (and,or) the bean counters pull the plug on it
Project 'B' 1. just scan maps in high res, don't bother to 'snap' because they are not to be used for navigational porpoises. Embed them in low-loss huge PDF. 2. place the entire package on the BitTorrent network with the University committed to keeping a perpetual seed online 3. build a static website giving a low-res 'taste' of the product, instructing students on how to set up BitTorrent and explaining the advantages to human civilization if you obtain and browse your own local copy, and many people all over keep an archive of this this precious historical work. 4. ten years later, there are several thousand copies of the work stored on several continents, ten seeds online (including the University who never experienced any serious bandwidth inconvenience) and the walls of many places are adorned with countless prints of these maps.
I'm all for pointy and clicky forms of ENTERTAINMENT, but for the same purposes as is served by a library, Project B looks like a really sound endeavor.
The sun may have fewer sunspots than expected for this time in the cycle, but it still has more spots than it did during the last minimum.
Going by a straight count of visible spots has served us pretty well since people started spotting spots. But while lots 'o spots have been spotted the magnetic flux and general energy release has been spotty. For another metric look at this comparison of spot-count to magnetic field data. Also see this solar slump article by Anthony Watts, and look for "pores" in the comments. The criteria for identifying spots is changing in ways that might overstate the count as compared with previous observational methods. Adjustment is inevitable -- we are using a sunspot count in historical record spanning the era of the naked eye right through improved optics to the whole-spectrum imaging of today.
I would like to point out a theory where a solar lull also results in lower global temperatures -- in a way that may be complementary with the UV-centric approach taken in TA... Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation. See this documentary Svensmark: The Cloud Mystery. Radiation-seeded cloud formation was first observed by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1896. In BBC: Connections, Death In The Morning (index to 38:15) James Burke describes the events that led to WIlson's great invention, the cloud chamber. I highly recommend the entire Connections series, especially the original first season which begins with "The Trigger Effect".
On clouds... another Good Watch is the BBC documentary on the phenomenon of Global Dimming, especially its opening minutes where David Travis of the University of Wisconsin measured a 1 degree C change in temperature ranges in the days following 9/11, when all aircraft in the US were grounded. This (shocking!) correlation, that could only be ascribed to a particular human activity -- a lack of contrail cloud seeding -- reminds us that our contribution to climate might far exceed pure-chemical CO2 causation.
On clouds... while researching contrails years ago I had a true what-the-fuck moment to see that NASA had also noticed significant human triggered cirrus cloud formation but managed to leverage the presence of cirrus (Minnis et. al) into a net warming effect. This has led to extraordinary ideas like enlarging ice crystal size in cirrus by seeding to 'reduce' this 'warming' effect. I am old school and any claim that increased clouds (of any kind) are net-warming and not net-cooling is an extraordinary claim and should be confirmed by an extraordinary level of proof, not just computer energy-budget models of incoming versus outgoing long-wave radiation. And I'm glad to see that the cirrus net effect is not yet decided by everyone.
On survival during the coming solar minimum... those jolly old River Thames Frost Fairs look like a a real tonne of funne, but faced with the likelihood of global cooling it behooves us to fast-track the development of Thorium based energy. Because MSR/Thorium is the answer for both Global Warming and Global Cooling. I am generally behooved these days.
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld. When I die, they will put me in a box and dispose of it in the cold ground. And in all the million ages to come, I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again. So won't you run and play with me here among the teeming mass of humanity? The universe has spared us this moment. ~~Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
If the super volcano were a Twinky, how big would it be?
According to this reputable source, the volume of a Twinkie is ~140 milliliters and the volume of the goo inside is 42.8 ml or ~30.5% of its total volume.
If Yellowstone's magma chamber is its goo and its volume is 200 cubic kilometers (low estimate), then the Yellowstone Twinkie itself would have a volume of ~656 cubic kilometers. If Twikie's W:L:H dimensions follow the ratio 15:39:11 then the Twinkie would be ~18.2 kilometers on its longest side, or 716,535 inches.
But supervolcanic calderas tend to form in roundish not Twinkie shapes, so it would be best to use the circular Ding Dong or its ellipsoidal counterpart, the Long Dong.
People must take precautions to avoid breathing ash. While even wet cotton can help, the use of respirators is recommended because the finest particles can be as small as 10 microns.
While dry ash is not conductive, even a small amount of moisture produces a paste that is conductive enough to cause high voltage flash-overs. Tall pylons with ceramic insulators may manage to stay clean but electrical substations where ash can form piles, are especially vulnerable.
And if insulators accumulate ash after a rain or already have ice on them it's pretty much flash-pow grid down.
Beyond the ash fall there are long-term climate concerns. There have been two major eruptions that have affected climate severely in the Northern Hemisphere with a clear historical record, Tambora (1815) and Krakatoa (535AD). I cover these in this recent Slashdot post.
My plan, and I am being pretty annoying about it in the hope that it becomes everyone's plan -- is to fast-track the two-fluid Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor to commercial deployment in North America AS SOON AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE, specifically the 1GW unit design with multiple on-site units sharing core salt reprocessing infrastructure -- that is a best-fit for our base load grid supply. These plants would deliver an unprecedented level of safety even if they are modularly constructed and mass-produced, will continue to operate even if rail or roads are damaged, and can store years of fuel on-site.
In short, a best hope for survival under many disaster scenarios, both natural and man-made.
The electrical grid is more of a problem since its points of failure cover a wide area and the vulnerability extends to the transformers in your neighborhood. For the grid I advocate a build-out of buried High Voltage DC conduits to interface between the three major North American interconnects, and to progressively deliver bridge junctions that can route around regional failures.
In short, we should be powering up new base load energy and building cross-country energy pipelines -- in addition to oil pipelines.
Re-tooling the grid will take much more time and capital than the deployment of LFTR but it is no less important. One of the advantages to LFTR is that it need not be sited near a large source of coolant water, so (unlike water reactors) there is NO region of North America that cannot accommodate this technology, and these plants can be built as far away from population centers as desired.
But it cannot and will not happen without your help.
[yawn] Bill Nye is jumping into an fight of squawking and feather-ruffling with no spurs on his toes. No clear victory is possible because the only referee who could call the plays and tally the score is God. Since God is strictly hands-off, there will be no thunderclap and deep booming voice to announce the winner.
Since Nye does not own a science theme park whose ticket sales could be bolstered by this event, he has already lost the debate.
Now if Bill Nye should instead choose to debate Christopher Monckton on anthropogenic climate change, the true nature of the CO2 as relates to the Greenhouse effect, and the applicability and veracity of long term computer models... THAT would be a debate worthy of popcorn.
To the Japanese, having something productive to do - kameseru - is as important as breathing.
THANK YOU for adding some interesting vox punctus contra punctum to the steady throb of exploitation exposé. Appreciation of pure kameseru does exist in Western cultures as well, though we try to balance it with a certain measure of laziness that varies with the individual.
Disaster cleanup is noble work what ever the hazards, compensation or conditions.
Here's hoping that with the intense scrutiny that this operation is under, the loosened purse-strings towards refugees (see the October 30 entry) and a sense of parity will ensure that those who participate will find suitable recompense.
There were 1 byte INTs, 2 byte INTs, 3 byte INTs and 4 byte INTs, variable length strings, booleans packed into bit fields, etc. It was very wire efficient, and this was because back then the wires were really slow. We had utilities developed to view the wire data and corelate it with the data dictionary, so we could inspect and debug captured wire data.
I feel you. Those wires were slow.
In the 90s I was toying with the ASN.1 spec and its many derivatives, trying to find a good balance between a wire-stream and random access storage protocol. It would consist of a series of synchronous streams transmitted in tandem with shifting, the most primitive being the raw ASN.1 transmittal of data, each successive meta-stream on top of it consisting of lisp-like primitives that act on the data and 'unroll' it into more symbolic form, providing entry vectors for traversal and parsing.
Each lisp instruction block received would be compiled into pseudocode, but also a cryptographically strong hash produced from it that was also transmitted as part of the data stream, the hash becoming so 'synonymous' with the operation that it pseudocode could be applied repeatedly. The whole purpose was to create within a dataset a nested roll/unroll philosophy which could take table data that has extremely compressible rows for example, and serialize it in such a way that the result is 'half data', 'half instruction' where the more compressible the data the 'half instruction' starts to approach 100%.
Then I realized that I was trying to invent a general-purpose sentient form of the bzip aka Burrowsâ"Wheeler transform, and for most practical purposes the non-sentient form for streams would overtake my own efforts as memory and processor power increased.
So I relaxed a bit (with my new found feeling of innovative inadequacy) and did other things, while I waited for simple Burrowsâ"Wheeler transforms to make their way into the texty streamy side of things.
They never did, because in all but rare cases simple stream LZW gets close enough. But that didn't set t5he world on fire either, not at first. Even mod_deflate and mod_gzip support for the mostly-ASCII web loads of yesterday was slow in coming. I remember triumphantly implementing mod_deflate in my Apache server only to disable it because some IEs would miss end of stream marks and hang. Things are much better now.
"Paul Rosenberg has uncovered some surprising new evidence that manned space travel is not only possible, it has actually been achieved using decades-old technology. Some 40 years in the making, a tale too amazing to remain untold. With a few quaint photographs he asks, could we build this? The answer is no. Or is it? It is uplifting to read that "Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars..." for it must take something really compelling to prevent us from reaching the stars, and he has nailed it. This essay makes the case that the headliner of 2052 may well be: Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 80-Year Old Technology. I can hardly wait! Down with robots."
I remember 1961 fondly. I was 31 then. You need to understand that those were very different times. That was pre-Boomer America, which I can assure you was much better than the post-Boomer America we have to deal with now. I'm not looking back through rose-colored glasses, either. The people and accomplishments speak for themselves.
As one of the 'last' of the boomers (b. '64) I'd love to be able to swallow your wholly-generational explanation for the general Suck of things but I cannot. I see too many re-connections of the same bad ideas across generations, often re-sold to the younger under thin new guises. Would that I took a position such as yours, I'd have a few younger generations to blame. But I will not sling it their way either.
A generational explanation does not explain the phenomenon that is Donald Rumsfeld for example, who cut his political teeth during one of the most drawn-out and pointless conflicts of the 20th century, only did he learn anything? No, rather he subsequently 'used' his venerated status to lure the United States into Afghanistan (for 'revenge') then into Iraq (under known-false pretenses) just as his younger neocon proxies are now doing to bring us to the brink of war with Iran. But as Ron Paul says, they attack us because we've been over there."
If the Flower Children have a fault, it is that they have been a bit too trusting, too distractable and too utopian for the room. And a tad short on the context of historical cause and effect. It was their Boomer parents who have failed to instill in them a broad and nuanced appreciation of history. And especially how it repeats itself.
In 2001 it was the Boomer demographic led the United States into pre-emptive war in the Middle East, believing that it was direct retribution for the felling of the Towers -- sold as a shocking and sudden Pearl Harbor. But yet, Pearl Harbor itself occurred during a time in which we had already declared war on Japan by blockade, a time in which direct conflict was inevitable. Though the war with Japan began (for most Americans) under the false pretense of a 'surprise' attack, I nevertheless consider the war itself just, as an unchallenged Japan allied with Germany would surely have been our downfall.
A similar historical disconnect occurs at the end of WWII, where an alarming number of Flower Children and their progeny consider the use of the Atomic Weapon to be not merely unjustified, actually a crime against humanity. Again the historical context fails them. For despite the fact that Japan was in retreat, they were on the eve of massively unleashing a devastating new weapon themselves -- the Kamikaze aircraft -- which would have destroyed the United States' fleet and turned the tides of war completely. Only the Bomb (and their belief that we had more than two of them) saved the United States and Japan from a gruesome escalation.
Now we have a President who champions Socialism under new and trendy names despite a clear warning from Putin (of all people) that it does not work. Go figure.
Baby Boomers do not know how to properly allocate resources, and that's why so much of America's economy is in turmoil, and its scientific research capabilities severely compromised.
THE MANY: why don't [greedy, evil] utilities just build smart grids and [benevolent] governments just enforce buy-back at retail? Or [to make up for perceived greediness] more than retail? Plus [free money] incentives for home owners in Pleasantville [no multifamily unit or slum dwellings need apply] to buy the stuff. And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me.
THE FEW: Grid already running near peak capacity because it was never built out for surplus, it was built as needed. Energy costs for base load generation plants is volatile and variable. Capital spent on new base load generation NOT re-designing and re-building infrastructure in Your Little Neighborhood.
THE MANY: but solar and wind generate during [daytime not night, never mind Winter] peak hours and so will we once the government gives us free money to buy all this great solar stuff so it's all good and when this [unlikely miracle] happens those base load plants can just bug off. While we're operational that is. We'll stay connected to the grid for old time's sake and to sell our power to the [evil] power company. Storage batteries will come along and will solve everything. For a day at least.
THE FEW: Who's willing to run some the odds that a geographically dispersed network of solar/wind hipsters each feeding a little bit into the grid is sure to keep it stable and keep this 24x7 factory running? What are the odds of a cascading domino failure triggered by the first untoward event, where the hipsters and tiny federally-subsidized hipster companies will drop off the grid quickly, like flies, to satisfy their own local needs?
THE MANY: Fuck the factory, and fuck those other grid people who do not embrace small scale or personal power solutions. They're probably wasting loads of energy anyway.
THE FEW: Okay, imagine trying to light a sports stadium with ten million tiny Christmas tree bulbs. The kind wired in series where whole sections go dark when one bulb fails. Now imagine that on the supply side, with a truly incomprehensible number of possible points of failure in place, instead of the historically reliable method of a few, professionally maintained gigawatt plants that generate baseload energy 24x7...
THE MANY: Sounds great! It would probably be good for the planet too.
THE FEW: [double facepalm] Troll us into oblivion why don't you.
The places the NSA would need cooperation are the commonly-utilised SSL-accessed services, primarily Facebook and Google mail/docs. Can't just fiber-tap those, and even if you could it'd be a nightmare trying to reconstruct things from taps alone. Having access to their databases would make utilising the information a lot easier.
Google has implemented Perfect Forward Secrecy (via ECDHE) since 2011 for clients which support it. You can test sites yourself with the Qualsys tool, look for 'FS' in the cipher list.
The widespread use of PFS will mitigate a purely human vulnerability: a distinct possibility that a some few humans in each of these major providers could be secretly supplying NSA with the operational SSL private keys that are used for HTTPS/SMTPTLS/SPOP/SIMAP.
Without PFS, imagine someone working IT at a bank exchanging a tiny flash drive containing years' worth of private SSL keys for a briefcase full of money. The moment the spooks plug in those keys, years of recorded encrypted SSL intercepts become readable, instantly. We are still at this stage, and most of the Internet is still vulnerable to this approach.
Is NSA/Utah breaking encryption codes with servers in a facility that requires 1.7 million gallons of coolant water per day? To some extent maybe, but the main emphasis will be on mass collection and bulk storage. And I am sure they have a map of tap points that surround Tier One exchanges, with an ever-increasing number of pins placed on it. Stalin would be proud.
Going into telephones -- cell providers aggregate roaming and billing information in a few central COs where a stream of call data is received. Land line providers are no different, and since there are no landline-only telecom providers left, the call information is likely to be accumulated in a few central places. Just a few taps and they have all the call and roam data they are accustomed to receiving. Will those telecom providers become aggravated that NSA is tapping their central offices, as Google is? Nope, with a nudge nudge wink wink they will leave their call metadata links encryption-free and be grateful that the straw man of voluntary data sharing has been brought down.
The ONLY HOPE of thwarting this turnkey police state is to publicly expose the existence of the taps (thank you Snowden) and DEFUND and DISMANTLE them.
(Hw much did he get paid to say that?) More likely just plain judge selection
I hear you and you are probably right! But no -- this whole case is a useless straw man. And with everyone here discussing it and reacting to it as if it is the 'REAL BATTLE' -- EVERYONE HERE is LOSING the battle. Distraction Complete. Pleas stop letting yourselves be distracted, people.
Telephone records, regardless of how much or how ever they are collected, are what judges and lawmakers consider to be "pen register trap and trace device record". There is legal precedent to this data collection which has been expanded, despite Internet protest, to include so-called header fields of email and HTTP request/response.
If you don't like that there is a whole shit-load of legislation that needs to be rolled back or repealed starting with USA Patriot going back through several iterations to specific provisions of the Electronic Communications (un)Privacy Act of 1984. In order even to understand the legal framework you are standing on this moment, you need law school training. Law enforcement has made several successful arguments that they deserve the right to access this data, and Congress has codified it. It is now that complicated and meshed.
I don't like it either but it seems the Democan and Republicrat parties do, each for their own stupid and naive reasons.
So it comes to be that this judge is ruling specifically on 'NSA Bulk Telephony Metadata Collection' and chooses to do so in a utopian frame of mind where Al-CIA-da is the supreme enemy. The ruling reads like a Zero Dark Thirty you-go-guys puff piece for the New York Times. How convenient for him, inconvenient for the rest of us.
The NSA's backbone fiber optic taps, which allow them to capture that same metadata in-network without a single silly provider agreement -- along with full content -- remain unaddressed. Even the Slashdot Headline mentions "NSA Data Collection" as if it is 'the battle'. It is a straw man.
NSA probably didn't want any public furor over their meta-data agreements, but on this day they are likely to be fanning this issue -- to distract attention away from taps and bulk content collection -- because when their wrist is slapped and, with great fanfare, metadata collection programs are 'scaled back', they can sink back into relative obscurity again.
If I have a tap on the backbone, why would I need AT&T, Verizon or Zaxxon to send data. As a stopgap measure perhaps, but the gap is closing. Why do you think Utah among others was chosen as a location? The scenery?
It is centrally located in a era where terrestrial fiber is still the best way to move gigabits.
The closest a judge has ever come to ruling on the real issue at hand is Hepting vs. AT&T. As Americans in defense of America exposing and dismantling the NSA content collection apparatus is one of our only remaining battles. It is high time to begin.
Slashdot Mirror
The wrath?????
No, the bath
Okay so these thingies will be able to print anything, so what would the economy be like? Well you'd download the latest template from the Internet and when you start to print your printer says, "GLOP OUT". So you go down to your local GLOP POD store and purchase the glop pods you need. Because the Starter Pod that came with your printer was only 30% full (joke's on you!).
There are glop pods for EVERYTHING. Almost-metal, almost-plastic, almost-wood... items manufactured with these bear an uncanny resemblance to the materials for which they are named, but manage to have no redeeming materials-strength or durability advantages to the originals. But you made it yourself. And it only consumed half the GLOP POD. But they're cheaper by the dozen.
And the food! There are three types of glop food pods available: Strawberry, Broccoli and Steak. Oops, I just printed a shoe out of Steak! Ha ha. I just printed a plastic hamburger!
Why do I get the impression that hundreds of years of applied materials science, chemistry and the economy of scale in manufacturing 'durable' goods, is being frivolously marginalized, and that the folks who are most excited are those who envision themselves running a GLOP POD store?
I would use a 3D printer to construct simple, rectangular stackable enclosures in which I would re-mount the electronic innards of my routers, external hard disks and modems, to replace the oogly rounded ugly non-stackable JUNK plastic art deco shapes that are produced today that look like stupid alien egg sacs.
How's that for 'customization'? Hrrmph.
[movie] set
Looks like I was right.
For every 10 morbidly fascinating conspiracy theories, there is one possibility that is most likely, boring and correct.
They turned the dial on the Milgram Experiment up to 11. Or so it seems...
1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3, It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.
I have programmed my talking alarm clock to say this.
Strong coffee with the consistency of pudding also helps.
The experiment goes ever on and on.
But a least it gives some arguments for a compationate God, since s/he does not smite them in anger for keeping on telling him, her, it how to do its job...
That sentence blew the personal pronoun component of my cognitive language corpus straight out the side of my head. Two hose clamps and some duct tape later, I think it's still leaking.
You might want to bone up on the Wiki entries for Personal Pronoun, the Gender Specific Pronoun, Gender Neutral and Cult of Androgyny. Once you make your way through all that you'll know why gentlemen of refined wit and impeccable manners refrain from making remarks to anyone. About anything. We just stare and drool.
infrastructure gobbles up a lot of money and its maintenance (or lack thereof) is a major issue in this country
You've nailed it. Infrastructure has become invisible, unlauded, boring. Infrastructure is the original stuff that matters.
Aside from entering some engineering field, there are ways that nerds can make a difference. Take this dam for example, clearly a certain level of routine surveillance had not been performed . If divers discover a 2 inch crack, could there have been a half inch or hairline crack some time ago? And could a more thorough use of remote imaging or even acoustic technology have spotted it? What if someone who reads Slashdot has an idea for some economical and effective way to inspect dams should contact Thomas Stredwick at PUD and offer expertise and propose such a method? At times history favors those who make those phone calls.
I define a 'nerd' as someone technologically aware who is capable, by the multidisciplinary nature of technology, of useful insight. The biggest problem with nerd-culture today in my opinion is that they tend to be observers who are not out there looking for problems to solve.
If you consider yourself to be tech-savvy in some field or are just interested in what problems are out there, check out the InnoCentive Challenges. These are a collection of problems to solve, big and little, that someone has documented and put up cash money to solve. Some of the challenges are interesting and very specific. For example, if you can propose a good way to Detect Protruding Nails in a Wooden Pallet that is going past on a conveyor belt, there might be $20,000 in it for you. Also lots of chemistry, medical materials science challenges.
Infrastructure should be a part of your child's exploration of the modern world. Underground by David Macaulay gives readers an introduction to utilities by presenting awesome ink drawings of incredible perspective and detail. As they start reading. Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape is the kind of book you want your children to grow up with and browse long before they understand all the words. Because great books about interesting things deliver the words to them.
I am an infrastructure maniac.
___
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
spring-and-weights thingy
I think you mean a governor, guv'ner. The origin of the Motor-Operated Pushover is aptly described here, "To think, all I had to do was put the balls on the other side! Aren't they beautiful?"
I like the Future, I'm in it.
Replacement stinkbugs have been ordered and are on their way up through Florida's major I-95 and I-75 corridors. Thank you for selecting the two-day shipping option.
Add $5.75 to your order to qualify for free shipping, with your trial of Amazon Prime. With your Prime subscription your orders may qualify for additional bonus items such as 3, 5 and 7 year Cicadas and Party Fun Paks of dark crusty bastard fungus that will cover and consume everything.
A copy of this order has been sent to your email address but the stinkbugs will probably arrive first.
Project 'A'
1. scan/digitize and 'snap' maps to geo coords and add markup
2. create website using active server scripts and HTML/js for drag/zoom navigation
3. release to the world with great fanfare
4. site is slashdotted, then eventually settles down to several terabytes/mo bandwidth
5. one year in, site is on the radar of cost/benefit analysis as an escalating expense
6. two years in, routine site changes break the atlas with few to mourn it (and,or) the bean counters pull the plug on it
Project 'B'
1. just scan maps in high res, don't bother to 'snap' because they are not to be used for navigational porpoises. Embed them in low-loss huge PDF.
2. place the entire package on the BitTorrent network with the University committed to keeping a perpetual seed online
3. build a static website giving a low-res 'taste' of the product, instructing students on how to set up BitTorrent and explaining the advantages to human civilization if you obtain and browse your own local copy, and many people all over keep an archive of this this precious historical work.
4. ten years later, there are several thousand copies of the work stored on several continents, ten seeds online (including the University who never experienced any serious bandwidth inconvenience) and the walls of many places are adorned with countless prints of these maps.
I'm all for pointy and clicky forms of ENTERTAINMENT, but for the same purposes as is served by a library, Project B looks like a really sound endeavor.
Also see this solar slump article by Anthony Watts
OOPS, I meant THIS solar slump article, not this solar slump article on Slashdot. Apologies to all who are trapped in a recursive loop.
The sun may have fewer sunspots than expected for this time in the cycle, but it still has more spots than it did during the last minimum.
Going by a straight count of visible spots has served us pretty well since people started spotting spots. But while lots 'o spots have been spotted the magnetic flux and general energy release has been spotty. For another metric look at this comparison of spot-count to magnetic field data. Also see this solar slump article by Anthony Watts, and look for "pores" in the comments. The criteria for identifying spots is changing in ways that might overstate the count as compared with previous observational methods. Adjustment is inevitable -- we are using a sunspot count in historical record spanning the era of the naked eye right through improved optics to the whole-spectrum imaging of today.
I would like to point out a theory where a solar lull also results in lower global temperatures -- in a way that may be complementary with the UV-centric approach taken in TA... Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation. See this documentary Svensmark: The Cloud Mystery. Radiation-seeded cloud formation was first observed by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1896. In BBC: Connections, Death In The Morning (index to 38:15) James Burke describes the events that led to WIlson's great invention, the cloud chamber. I highly recommend the entire Connections series, especially the original first season which begins with "The Trigger Effect".
On clouds... another Good Watch is the BBC documentary on the phenomenon of Global Dimming, especially its opening minutes where David Travis of the University of Wisconsin measured a 1 degree C change in temperature ranges in the days following 9/11, when all aircraft in the US were grounded. This (shocking!) correlation, that could only be ascribed to a particular human activity -- a lack of contrail cloud seeding -- reminds us that our contribution to climate might far exceed pure-chemical CO2 causation.
On clouds... while researching contrails years ago I had a true what-the-fuck moment to see that NASA had also noticed significant human triggered cirrus cloud formation but managed to leverage the presence of cirrus (Minnis et. al) into a net warming effect. This has led to extraordinary ideas like enlarging ice crystal size in cirrus by seeding to 'reduce' this 'warming' effect. I am old school and any claim that increased clouds (of any kind) are net-warming and not net-cooling is an extraordinary claim and should be confirmed by an extraordinary level of proof, not just computer energy-budget models of incoming versus outgoing long-wave radiation. And I'm glad to see that the cirrus net effect is not yet decided by everyone.
On survival during the coming solar minimum... those jolly old River Thames Frost Fairs look like a a real tonne of funne, but faced with the likelihood of global cooling it behooves us to fast-track the development of Thorium based energy. Because MSR/Thorium is the answer for both Global Warming and Global Cooling. I am generally behooved these days.
Also... the timely development of molten salt reactors and supplying the globe with cheaper grid-energy would improve the human race. It would help to offset the effect of driving on women's pelvises by relief from washing clothes by hand.
___
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
We are stardust, man.
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld.
When I die, they will put me in a box
and dispose of it in the cold ground.
And in all the million ages to come,
I will never breathe, or laugh, or twitch again.
So won't you run and play with me here
among the teeming mass of humanity?
The universe has spared us this moment.
~~Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
If the super volcano were a Twinky, how big would it be?
According to this reputable source, the volume of a Twinkie is ~140 milliliters and the volume of the goo inside is 42.8 ml or ~30.5% of its total volume.
If Yellowstone's magma chamber is its goo and its volume is 200 cubic kilometers (low estimate), then the Yellowstone Twinkie itself would have a volume of ~656 cubic kilometers. If Twikie's W:L:H dimensions follow the ratio 15:39:11 then the Twinkie would be ~18.2 kilometers on its longest side, or 716,535 inches.
But supervolcanic calderas tend to form in roundish not Twinkie shapes, so it would be best to use the circular Ding Dong or its ellipsoidal counterpart, the Long Dong.
People must take precautions to avoid breathing ash. While even wet cotton can help, the use of respirators is recommended because the finest particles can be as small as 10 microns.
While dry ash is not conductive, even a small amount of moisture produces a paste that is conductive enough to cause high voltage flash-overs. Tall pylons with ceramic insulators may manage to stay clean but electrical substations where ash can form piles, are especially vulnerable.
And if insulators accumulate ash after a rain or already have ice on them it's pretty much flash-pow grid down.
BBC did a great two hour docudrama depicting possible effects, Supervolcano [2006] along with a companion program Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone
Beyond the ash fall there are long-term climate concerns. There have been two major eruptions that have affected climate severely in the Northern Hemisphere with a clear historical record, Tambora (1815) and Krakatoa (535AD). I cover these in this recent Slashdot post.
My plan, and I am being pretty annoying about it in the hope that it becomes everyone's plan -- is to fast-track the two-fluid Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor to commercial deployment in North America AS SOON AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE, specifically the 1GW unit design with multiple on-site units sharing core salt reprocessing infrastructure -- that is a best-fit for our base load grid supply. These plants would deliver an unprecedented level of safety even if they are modularly constructed and mass-produced, will continue to operate even if rail or roads are damaged, and can store years of fuel on-site.
In short, a best hope for survival under many disaster scenarios, both natural and man-made.
The electrical grid is more of a problem since its points of failure cover a wide area and the vulnerability extends to the transformers in your neighborhood. For the grid I advocate a build-out of buried High Voltage DC conduits to interface between the three major North American interconnects, and to progressively deliver bridge junctions that can route around regional failures.
In short, we should be powering up new base load energy and building cross-country energy pipelines -- in addition to oil pipelines.
Re-tooling the grid will take much more time and capital than the deployment of LFTR but it is no less important. One of the advantages to LFTR is that it need not be sited near a large source of coolant water, so (unlike water reactors) there is NO region of North America that cannot accommodate this technology, and these plants can be built as far away from population centers as desired.
But it cannot and will not happen without your help.
See my letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
And see the fascinating Thorium Remix 2011 presentation.
Also, here is an excellent overview on HVDC pipelines: Roger W. Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security
[yawn] Bill Nye is jumping into an fight of squawking and feather-ruffling with no spurs on his toes. No clear victory is possible because the only referee who could call the plays and tally the score is God. Since God is strictly hands-off, there will be no thunderclap and deep booming voice to announce the winner.
Since Nye does not own a science theme park whose ticket sales could be bolstered by this event, he has already lost the debate.
Since Ham owns a theme park where it is fun to imagine Tyrannosaurus Rex as a vegan doggie being petted by a smiling cave woman in a sexy (loom-woven) tunic ... he has already won the debate.
Now if Bill Nye should instead choose to debate Christopher Monckton on anthropogenic climate change, the true nature of the CO2 as relates to the Greenhouse effect, and the applicability and veracity of long term computer models ... THAT would be a debate worthy of popcorn.
To the Japanese, having something productive to do - kameseru - is as important as breathing.
THANK YOU for adding some interesting vox punctus contra punctum to the steady throb of exploitation exposé. Appreciation of pure kameseru does exist in Western cultures as well, though we try to balance it with a certain measure of laziness that varies with the individual.
Disaster cleanup is noble work what ever the hazards, compensation or conditions.
Here's hoping that with the intense scrutiny that this operation is under, the loosened purse-strings towards refugees (see the October 30 entry) and a sense of parity will ensure that those who participate will find suitable recompense.
And no, this is not what I had in mind.
There were 1 byte INTs, 2 byte INTs, 3 byte INTs and 4 byte INTs, variable length strings, booleans packed into bit fields, etc. It was very wire efficient, and this was because back then the wires were really slow. We had utilities developed to view the wire data and corelate it with the data dictionary, so we could inspect and debug captured wire data.
I feel you. Those wires were slow.
In the 90s I was toying with the ASN.1 spec and its many derivatives, trying to find a good balance between a wire-stream and random access storage protocol. It would consist of a series of synchronous streams transmitted in tandem with shifting, the most primitive being the raw ASN.1 transmittal of data, each successive meta-stream on top of it consisting of lisp-like primitives that act on the data and 'unroll' it into more symbolic form, providing entry vectors for traversal and parsing.
Each lisp instruction block received would be compiled into pseudocode, but also a cryptographically strong hash produced from it that was also transmitted as part of the data stream, the hash becoming so 'synonymous' with the operation that it pseudocode could be applied repeatedly. The whole purpose was to create within a dataset a nested roll/unroll philosophy which could take table data that has extremely compressible rows for example, and serialize it in such a way that the result is 'half data', 'half instruction' where the more compressible the data the 'half instruction' starts to approach 100%.
Then I realized that I was trying to invent a general-purpose sentient form of the bzip aka Burrowsâ"Wheeler transform, and for most practical purposes the non-sentient form for streams would overtake my own efforts as memory and processor power increased.
So I relaxed a bit (with my new found feeling of innovative inadequacy) and did other things, while I waited for simple Burrowsâ"Wheeler transforms to make their way into the texty streamy side of things.
They never did, because in all but rare cases simple stream LZW gets close enough. But that didn't set t5he world on fire either, not at first. Even mod_deflate and mod_gzip support for the mostly-ASCII web loads of yesterday was slow in coming. I remember triumphantly implementing mod_deflate in my Apache server only to disable it because some IEs would miss end of stream marks and hang. Things are much better now.
Apollo 15 was like 40 years ago...
Amazing isn't it. Who knew??
I covered this exciting news back in September in this [failed] Slashdot submission,
Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 40-Year Old Technology
TheRealHocusLocus writes
"Paul Rosenberg has uncovered some surprising new evidence that manned space travel is not only possible, it has actually been achieved using decades-old technology. Some 40 years in the making, a tale too amazing to remain untold. With a few quaint photographs he asks, could we build this? The answer is no. Or is it? It is uplifting to read that "Productive humans have been delegated to mute observance as their hard-earned surplus is syphoned off to capital cities, where it is sanctimoniously poured down a sewer of cultured dependencies and endless wars..." for it must take something really compelling to prevent us from reaching the stars, and he has nailed it. This essay makes the case that the headliner of 2052 may well be: Breakthrough: Manned Space Travel Achieved Using 80-Year Old Technology. I can hardly wait! Down with robots."
I'm surprised about snapchat honestly. so apparently tweens sext more than they actually talk?
Obligatory XKCD
Thread ditto Straw Man ditto
Yadda yadda boo boo pee doo.
I remember 1961 fondly. I was 31 then. You need to understand that those were very different times. That was pre-Boomer America, which I can assure you was much better than the post-Boomer America we have to deal with now. I'm not looking back through rose-colored glasses, either. The people and accomplishments speak for themselves.
As one of the 'last' of the boomers (b. '64) I'd love to be able to swallow your wholly-generational explanation for the general Suck of things but I cannot. I see too many re-connections of the same bad ideas across generations, often re-sold to the younger under thin new guises. Would that I took a position such as yours, I'd have a few younger generations to blame. But I will not sling it their way either.
A generational explanation does not explain the phenomenon that is Donald Rumsfeld for example, who cut his political teeth during one of the most drawn-out and pointless conflicts of the 20th century, only did he learn anything? No, rather he subsequently 'used' his venerated status to lure the United States into Afghanistan (for 'revenge') then into Iraq (under known-false pretenses) just as his younger neocon proxies are now doing to bring us to the brink of war with Iran. But as Ron Paul says, they attack us because we've been over there."
If the Flower Children have a fault, it is that they have been a bit too trusting, too distractable and too utopian for the room. And a tad short on the context of historical cause and effect. It was their Boomer parents who have failed to instill in them a broad and nuanced appreciation of history. And especially how it repeats itself.
In 2001 it was the Boomer demographic led the United States into pre-emptive war in the Middle East, believing that it was direct retribution for the felling of the Towers -- sold as a shocking and sudden Pearl Harbor. But yet, Pearl Harbor itself occurred during a time in which we had already declared war on Japan by blockade, a time in which direct conflict was inevitable. Though the war with Japan began (for most Americans) under the false pretense of a 'surprise' attack, I nevertheless consider the war itself just, as an unchallenged Japan allied with Germany would surely have been our downfall.
A similar historical disconnect occurs at the end of WWII, where an alarming number of Flower Children and their progeny consider the use of the Atomic Weapon to be not merely unjustified, actually a crime against humanity. Again the historical context fails them. For despite the fact that Japan was in retreat, they were on the eve of massively unleashing a devastating new weapon themselves -- the Kamikaze aircraft -- which would have destroyed the United States' fleet and turned the tides of war completely. Only the Bomb (and their belief that we had more than two of them) saved the United States and Japan from a gruesome escalation.
Now we have a President who champions Socialism under new and trendy names despite a clear warning from Putin (of all people) that it does not work. Go figure.
Baby Boomers do not know how to properly allocate resources, and that's why so much of America's economy is in turmoil, and its scientific research capabilities severely compromised.
Who is John Galt?
THE MANY: why don't [greedy, evil] utilities just build smart grids and [benevolent] governments just enforce buy-back at retail? Or [to make up for perceived greediness] more than retail? Plus [free money] incentives for home owners in Pleasantville [no multifamily unit or slum dwellings need apply] to buy the stuff. And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me.
THE FEW: Grid already running near peak capacity because it was never built out for surplus, it was built as needed. Energy costs for base load generation plants is volatile and variable. Capital spent on new base load generation NOT re-designing and re-building infrastructure in Your Little Neighborhood.
THE MANY: but solar and wind generate during [daytime not night, never mind Winter] peak hours and so will we once the government gives us free money to buy all this great solar stuff so it's all good and when this [unlikely miracle] happens those base load plants can just bug off. While we're operational that is. We'll stay connected to the grid for old time's sake and to sell our power to the [evil] power company. Storage batteries will come along and will solve everything. For a day at least.
THE FEW: Who's willing to run some the odds that a geographically dispersed network of solar/wind hipsters each feeding a little bit into the grid is sure to keep it stable and keep this 24x7 factory running? What are the odds of a cascading domino failure triggered by the first untoward event, where the hipsters and tiny federally-subsidized hipster companies will drop off the grid quickly, like flies, to satisfy their own local needs?
THE MANY: Fuck the factory, and fuck those other grid people who do not embrace small scale or personal power solutions. They're probably wasting loads of energy anyway.
THE FEW: Okay, imagine trying to light a sports stadium with ten million tiny Christmas tree bulbs. The kind wired in series where whole sections go dark when one bulb fails. Now imagine that on the supply side, with a truly incomprehensible number of possible points of failure in place, instead of the historically reliable method of a few, professionally maintained gigawatt plants that generate baseload energy 24x7...
THE MANY: Sounds great! It would probably be good for the planet too.
THE FEW: [double facepalm] Troll us into oblivion why don't you.
___
THE ONE: 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
The places the NSA would need cooperation are the commonly-utilised SSL-accessed services, primarily Facebook and Google mail/docs. Can't just fiber-tap those, and even if you could it'd be a nightmare trying to reconstruct things from taps alone. Having access to their databases would make utilising the information a lot easier.
Google has implemented Perfect Forward Secrecy (via ECDHE) since 2011 for clients which support it. You can test sites yourself with the Qualsys tool, look for 'FS' in the cipher list.
The widespread use of PFS will mitigate a purely human vulnerability: a distinct possibility that a some few humans in each of these major providers could be secretly supplying NSA with the operational SSL private keys that are used for HTTPS/SMTPTLS/SPOP/SIMAP.
Without PFS, imagine someone working IT at a bank exchanging a tiny flash drive containing years' worth of private SSL keys for a briefcase full of money. The moment the spooks plug in those keys, years of recorded encrypted SSL intercepts become readable, instantly. We are still at this stage, and most of the Internet is still vulnerable to this approach.
Is NSA/Utah breaking encryption codes with servers in a facility that requires 1.7 million gallons of coolant water per day? To some extent maybe, but the main emphasis will be on mass collection and bulk storage. And I am sure they have a map of tap points that surround Tier One exchanges, with an ever-increasing number of pins placed on it. Stalin would be proud.
Going into telephones -- cell providers aggregate roaming and billing information in a few central COs where a stream of call data is received. Land line providers are no different, and since there are no landline-only telecom providers left, the call information is likely to be accumulated in a few central places. Just a few taps and they have all the call and roam data they are accustomed to receiving. Will those telecom providers become aggravated that NSA is tapping their central offices, as Google is? Nope, with a nudge nudge wink wink they will leave their call metadata links encryption-free and be grateful that the straw man of voluntary data sharing has been brought down.
The ONLY HOPE of thwarting this turnkey police state is to publicly expose the existence of the taps (thank you Snowden) and DEFUND and DISMANTLE them.
(Hw much did he get paid to say that?) More likely just plain judge selection
I hear you and you are probably right! But no -- this whole case is a useless straw man. And with everyone here discussing it and reacting to it as if it is the 'REAL BATTLE' -- EVERYONE HERE is LOSING the battle. Distraction Complete. Pleas stop letting yourselves be distracted, people.
Telephone records, regardless of how much or how ever they are collected, are what judges and lawmakers consider to be "pen register trap and trace device record". There is legal precedent to this data collection which has been expanded, despite Internet protest, to include so-called header fields of email and HTTP request/response.
If you don't like that there is a whole shit-load of legislation that needs to be rolled back or repealed starting with USA Patriot going back through several iterations to specific provisions of the Electronic Communications (un)Privacy Act of 1984. In order even to understand the legal framework you are standing on this moment, you need law school training. Law enforcement has made several successful arguments that they deserve the right to access this data, and Congress has codified it. It is now that complicated and meshed.
I don't like it either but it seems the Democan and Republicrat parties do, each for their own stupid and naive reasons.
So it comes to be that this judge is ruling specifically on 'NSA Bulk Telephony Metadata Collection' and chooses to do so in a utopian frame of mind where Al-CIA-da is the supreme enemy. The ruling reads like a Zero Dark Thirty you-go-guys puff piece for the New York Times. How convenient for him, inconvenient for the rest of us.
The NSA's backbone fiber optic taps, which allow them to capture that same metadata in-network without a single silly provider agreement -- along with full content -- remain unaddressed. Even the Slashdot Headline mentions "NSA Data Collection" as if it is 'the battle'. It is a straw man.
NSA probably didn't want any public furor over their meta-data agreements, but on this day they are likely to be fanning this issue -- to distract attention away from taps and bulk content collection -- because when their wrist is slapped and, with great fanfare, metadata collection programs are 'scaled back', they can sink back into relative obscurity again.
If I have a tap on the backbone, why would I need AT&T, Verizon or Zaxxon to send data. As a stopgap measure perhaps, but the gap is closing. Why do you think Utah among others was chosen as a location? The scenery?
It is centrally located in a era where terrestrial fiber is still the best way to move gigabits.
The closest a judge has ever come to ruling on the real issue at hand is Hepting vs. AT&T. As Americans in defense of America exposing and dismantling the NSA content collection apparatus is one of our only remaining battles. It is high time to begin.
Thar be dragins in our midst. Slay them.
NSA and the Desolation of Smaug