If you are a universe designer, the best way to DEFEAT anyone trying to "measure the energy of quantum particles and to calculate their cutoff point as energy is dispersed due to interactions with leetle microwaveses" is to
Add a small random time delay to all server responses to the SMTP RCPT, EXPN and VRFY directives.
The wily universe hackers will undoubtedly discover the delay and its purpose, but they will be unable to plot their time measurements in orthogonal space without distension of phase-space, the shifter knob coming off in their hands.
Unable to prove their neat little theory they will be compelled to insert another coin -- and another. As the walls of their prison laugh at them. That is how the Universe feeds.
"I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my.NET skillset is woefully out of date"
Oh yeah?? I'm 48 and my skill set is so out of date that 'Microsoft dot-net' was just ONE of those little bumps on the road I passed on learning because I was so already behind the times.
I'm so behind the times -- that when you're done with it all you will find no place to park, people like me will have taken all the MIS-handicapped parking spaces. Bring your microsoft-dot-net challenged brain to the field of battle, we'll play bumper cars with our power chairs while our false teeth fall out and the technological world evolves around us. Then we'll get drunk and raise a glass to those poor young people agonizing over amazon.com's new API and whether Google will eat it alive and blow it out the backside. Sorry, I mean back-end.
Fools.
Then we'll go out for steak and cut it into little pieces while we laugh about SQL, how everything was almost totally transactional for so long and they still cannot get it quite right. How RS-232 is dying and nothing out there is robust enough to replace it under the extreme conditions of the real world. How in place of a Real Wire laid by Real Men to solve Real Problems, now everybody's going wireless and clueless and things stop working when granny parks her pickup truck on the curb.
How all the cellphones in the world will some day stop working, all at once, for the same reason -- or just no reason at all.
And they will slap their tiny useless phones and look around at the corroded wire infrastructure that once was the Bell Telephone Network where the rest of the world could break into little pieces and the people in your own home town could still get dial tones and call each other.
When I was 15 years old I was maintaining S-100 computers. This was even before CP/M added the 'userarea' command. Then it all changed. Try PIP-ing from one user area to another without PIP-ping PIP first.
I've spent my whole life in over my head, behind the times, washed out, faking it, using blunt software tools to perform delicate surgery (registry corruption? Boot from linux and delete the whole damned hive)
And you're upset that microsoft-dot-net has passed you by? Take heart my friend, dot-net is just a fart in a high wind. It will not matter in ten thousand years.
Spend time with your children. Life may not be all you want but it's all you got So stick a flower in your belly button and be happy.
Active acoustic cancellation would only really work below 100hz. Either the source needs to be acquired directionally by microphone then inverted and rebroadcast wide field (would not work for traffic)... OR the source captured outside then inverted and rebroadcast directionally/directly (as is done with cancelling headphones)... you cannot cancel reliably wide angle to wide angle unless there is some delaying directional component in the conduit, such as if your room is at the end of a sound conducting corridor. Try it and you will get strange feedback that curdles milk. You might however be able to create a narrow directional 'cone of silence' within a room however. Things might sound strange at the boundaries of the cone.
Version Control is like a very long cat. You pull the
latest stable version off in New York, meanwhile an unstable beta is mewing in Los Angeles. Version Control is the same, only there is no cat.
'Cui bono' test for Iran: LOW What? They're going to make off with virtual sacks of money? What a coincidence that they decided to launch this soft attack while real military hardware is converging on their location.
Ramping anti-Iran sentiment via false flag hacking tricks: HIGH It's what we do, it's what the Israelis do. Proudly and loudly. But not in this particular instance, right?
It's a test to see what you're willing to believe.
be still my beating heart
hurricane schmirricane
DO YOU REALIZE that because hurrricanes make everyone take cover and keep the idiots off the roads, there are far fewer deaths from the hurricane than would have been traffic fatalities during that period. HURRICANES SAVE LIVES.
they treat potential for disaster as disaster
shows a short circuit in the risk assessment
misdirected erudition with emotional angst
Katrina: "It's a hurricane, this things goona get us!"
SHOULD HAVE BEEN: "Look Marge, the City is below sea level. This is gonna get us."
Fukushima: "Evil radiation meltdown sub-Denver levels bad bad bad fear doom Nature hates us!"
SHOULD HAVE BEEN: "Look Marge, all the backup generators are in the basement not protected by a watertight door. This is dumb in a way that has nothing to do with radiation."
I find it ironic that an approach with a proven track record, Mutual Assured Destruction, has been lambasted as some sort of cold-war artifact, of intrinsic evil. The threat of Armageddon is the evil, MAD was the preventative. The United States of America was even founded on it. The 'armed militia model' where the empire and an armed populace, each with the power to hold the other in check -- the whole quotable 'We the People' litany -- is just a flowery and (to our ears) archaically quaint way of introducing the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction as a deterrent to tyranny. In a practical and historical sense MAD is the only device capable of holding peoples in restraint, long enough that the meme of self-restraint might creep into the culture.
It's just like guns. We've seen Sum of All Fears. There are presently enough loose nuke warheads and 'nuclear partners' to make them, to keep the world supplied with little boomers like the one that took out Baltimore Stadium -- for thousands of years of dirty little tricks and false flag pranks. Why not accept that as a 'given' rather than participating in escalating campaigns of denial? It's like turning in all the guns... and of course we were only joking last time, this time we'll get all of them, another historical circus recursus which always seems to distill into a "You first, we'll reconsider later" policy.
Then there is the business of generating energy. Nuclear Fission is the only -- only! only! -- thing on the table that could keep the grid up through some long, dark winter of inclement weather with limited or no transportation infrastructure operating. Neither solar, nor wind nor great rail-transported volume of coal passes this simple test. Nuclear plants are self contained and require only occasional delivery of fuel, which could be carried by mule train (a big slow one but hey, it's possible and I'd love to see that)
Which is why I get pissed whenever my country goes ballistic on nuclear energy programs around the world. In a country like Iran nuclear energy is the only way to ensure a peaceful future because you can guard shipments of nuclear fuel, you can harden security around plants, but no one will ever be able to protect liquid or gas pipelines. Never mind the oil in the ground. What hope do they (or anyone) have for stability? Aside from being stupid, I consider the US's policy on nuclear development tantamount to terrorism itself. Like regulating, confiscating and blocking distribution of penicillin.
Special
note to the Japanese: please do not put your emergency backup generators in a basement at sea level with no watertight doors or bulkheads protecting them from complete immersion. All the haughty discussion about 'is nuclear a good idea' re: Fukushima is smoke and mirrors, Fukushima was a 19th-century 'FAIL' in terms of how simply it could have been prevented. Yes, I'm talking about steel doors and rubber seals! It really is THAT simple! Some 19th century steel door and rubber seal technology would have changed everything. Merely a mess, not a disaster.
The idea of elections with no forensically unique paper ballot or running printed tape -- ridiculous the day it was proposed. Where were the smart people then?? Now??
Being an established computer consultant,
I got to provide input when the US Virgin Islands' election system was upgraded, a good friend on the Board of Elections brought over a bunch of brochures for me to review one evening in 1985. There were chad systems ("Punch cards? You must be joking!") There were optical zoned page scanners and push-button machines ("Where's the paper trail? Do you know what a 'hacker' is?" "It's available but 'costs extra'. Are these people for real??").
My friend and I agreed -- his vote on the Board of Elections -- was to keep the paper ballot. People are used to it. If anything, beef up the security and oversight surrounding transport of ballots cast; use bleeding-edge technology cautiously and wisely: do the counting of paper ballots with optical readers. Because just like the money counter machines, you can do it again quickly to see if you get the same result. And if the machines break and the power goes out -- the election process is 'safe', breezes along as smoothly as ever -- only the results are delayed.
Just WHEN was it decided that election results needed to be tallied in hours or minutes? From where did the pressure arise such that hand counting of paper ballots (or in the least, optical scan of same) is too slow? That we instead impose few-vendor centralized no-paper systems that are inherently hackable?
Here's the test I impose. A paper ballot system may also have its problems -- BIG BUT -- any given layman you bring in off the street to observe the tally process will have a clear view of a ballot box's chain of custody. Any layman observing the subsequent counting of those ballots (by hand or optical reader, with verification of random batches to test the reader) has a clear grasp of the process, and can tell whether the system is honest.
If it's Democracy you want, use as simple a voting/tally system as possible; for the tally process use as many human beings as possible, local volunteers as participants and observers.
If it's Oligarchy you want, go ahead and totally castrate the process of transparency by implementing insecurity through obscurity, touch screen BS with no hope of verification or recount.
The idea of all-electronic voting really should have been laughed out of the room, once upon a time. This is coming from a techie who favors modernization in other areas of society.
My friend on the Board was voted down: they decided to purchase push-button machines from Shouptronics... but at least the each station had its own built-in battery backup and built in receipt-type printer that ran a paper tape. Unlike most today.
whether whitespace broadband will be success. The Emperors are just now arriving at the rookery sites and mating will soon commence. After eggs are transfered to the males and the females go off to feed, expect some early indications July at the earliest to see how many eggs have survived the difficult incubation period. During total whiteout conditions of deep Antarctic winter they will huddle together in the whitespace. If too many eggs have frozen or dropped onto the ice the telecoms may as well hang it all up. September is when we'll know for sure if the spectrum left over from old telly channels can store enough fish goo for regurgitation. In December the grown chicks will be off we'll have a real fledge count to go on. I hope they will be big and fat so we all can get more throughput.
It would probably take us MILLIONS of years to reach the nearest planet that's even remotely habitable. We don't have any kind of technology that could possibly survive that long, much less that could keep fragile human bodies alive that long.
Who said anything about a planet?
Spin a ring to Earth gravity, put up a few mirrors... or dome a crater on the moon with a thick lens of water to stop gamma rays, stock it with fish... in lunar gravity at one atmosphere trees would reach gigantic proportions, people could strap on wings and fly...
True, true -- it isn't, but there are stopgap measures such as breeder reactors and "enhanced burnup" ["Up to a third of all electricity produced in the current US reactor fleet comes from bred fuel, and the industry is working steadily to increase that percentage as time goes on."] Ultimately off-world sources (alas not the moon, insufficient concentrations of heavy elements) or some Really-Better-Than-Fissile-Nuclear energy option when it comes along. I believe fission is the only thing that will buy us enough time.
Sorry for the rant and thread drift, thanks for the reply.
Yeah, let us engage in elaborate engineering works to discover the geological consequences of fracking with 'dormant' volcanoes -- what a valuable learning experience. Spend untold millions over 50 years to go for that grail of 10% electrical production.
Meanwhile, 103 out-dated nuclear power plants are presently generating 20% of the whole grid, TODAY. With state-of-the-art designs, some up-scaling nuclear could generate 101% of the grid TOMORROW (ok well, let's say 10-15 years...)
The thing never discussed along with geothermal energy potential is the highly corrosive environment that the turbines must work with. The thing never discussed along with wind potential the laughably impossible task of keeping enough generators working at any one time -- to accomplish anything other than fleecing the customer and keep the subsidies flowing.
Photonic Solar Energy does not scale, and the first climate/volcanic cloud cover event is the end of civilization. The only way solar could scale to current demand (and penetrate cloud cover) is if it were captured in geosynchronous orbit and beamed to earth stations in a diffuse beam of microwaves. But then you have a SINGLE entity in control of world power generation which is another name for 'one world government' -- any takers?
These alternative-to-nuclear energy methods are mental lollipops to suck on while we delay making a decision. Success and survival if we go nuclear, failure and endless war over oil if we don't.
Note to human race: go seriously nuclear soon alreay, or die.
I am firmly opposed to the spread of microchips either to the home or to the office. We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive unemployment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry.
Yours faithfully,
Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J. P.
Sevenoaks
P.S. Verily, I should hasten to mention that Twitter does aid and abet Terrorism.
"...How can inventor-entrepreneurs like Edison make a profit if every time they try to make a technological advance some nut in Congress pulls the rug out from under the them and their breakthroughs...?"
Oh yeah, I'm SHUURE Edison would be SO happy with the Federal Government placing a moratorium on the sale of an existing major product, one which at least half of all consumers prefer to the new. Rather than releasing both and letting the market decide.
Are our neurons so heavily jaded or taxed by lush vibrant reality which surrounds us, that we achieve some mental orgasma at the sight of some crappy pixelated model of real-life process...? Building with Lego is like, well, uninventing the wheel. Seeing the world through Nintendo glasses.
Or its evil cousin Digital All-or-Nothingism promoted by kindergarten FAIL engineers which has killed broadcast television. DIGITAL TV IS LEGO TV. Where you once had a graceful degradation curve in fringe areas in which an analog television broadcast would go progressively snowy but still viewable (audio still perfect!) over a large area... now you have a useless and terrifying eruption of multicolored boxes accompanied by spurts of silence and blackscreen. If this is progress I'm a blockhead. Just hope them bastards keep their LEGO mitts off of analog FM.
Remember Bell Standard Practices, the smooth audio response curve of analog telephone equipment... balanced pairs, the digital fixed rate ~56k as the rule. The days of long distance dialup BBS where even complex tone protocols could be reliable. Now we have turkey garble bizzlefart cell phones and even long distance circuits for wire telephone providers use gibbering poop compression. Voices sploitch and gurgle like a death rattle. Music on hold sounds like continuous projectile vomit. "MODERN" DIGITAL TELEPHONY IS LEGO TELEPHONY.
And don't get me started about digital "cameras" as opposed to film. The great great grandchildren will think granny was made out of LEGO blocks, the way she looks when they zoom in close. When you zoom in with film people become grainy but they're still, well, people, not nightmarish pixelcritters with beady eyes. Matthew Brady is sobbing in his grave.
Where is it all going? Eventually the whole world will dissolve into a simple square wave like the red pill scene in Matrix and finally the whole universe will go DC. All of existence compressed into one bit.
We are the hollow men
We are the LEGO men
Stuck together
Edges sharp and painful underfoot. Alas!
Our crappy digital voices, when
We whisper together
are rendered as unintelligible by codec errors
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellular
This is the way the conversation ends
This is the way the conversation ends
This is the way the conversation ends
Not by bang or whimper: with a turkey fart.
Digital storage media for long term -- which I'd take as a human lifespan at least -- simply does not exist right now. It just hasn't been a priority in consumer based technologies, and is not likely to become one any time soon. Even if it did exist it would be expensive, reliance on it alone would not work, any single titanium box of gold plated discs would end up in a landfill somewhere the first time a marriage ends badly.
Only family based tradition can bridge time with assurance. There must be some one to gather the material, decide on the medium and see that the copies are tested and the collection is updated regularly. Also at least one other 'backup librarian' person -- preferably far away -- holding a copy. In every generation there should be one 'primary' and one 'backup' librarian. Consider the role of primary librarian as one not be taken lightly, which deserves the respect of (and occasional monetary support from) the entire family.
What I am saying is, it is not enough for everyone in a large family to acknowledge to one another, "You have a bunch of stuff, so do I, I'll send you mine some day, or..." Some day never comes. People forget. Disks crash. Only someone so designated as 'librarian' emowered with personal responsibility who follows a ritualistic backup/mirror strategy can make it work.
Choose some modern but cheap medium, for example 500GB or 1TB external USB drives. Get three of them, A B & C. Put the whole collection on each and send 'C' to the backup librarian. During the year write new material to 'A', mirror the changes to 'B' occasionally. At the end of the year mail 'B' to the backup librarian, upon receipt they mail back 'C' which you also bring up to date. You keep swapping 'B' and 'C' through the mail, only one in transit at any time. Of course, the failure of any disk demands immediate replacement.
A paper document and personal letter from you explaining the collection and instructions for keeping it up to date should be kept with each drive... so even if the scheme does not work out, some descendant might read it and be moved to salvage the data and carry the tradition forward.
As the years go by no doubt better mediums and methods will be available... but once you have gathered and built your Collection, mirrored and have a backup copy far away you can say to yourself, "That will be a task for a future librarian." and take pride in the statement! For you have done much more than just gathered and written some stuff... you have created a 'mantle of responsibility' which is just a wetware based mechanism to see that the job is done.
ON THIS DAY, when we seek answers as to what people were thinking 3,000 years ago,
We visit the pyramids of egypt, read the proud inscriptions of stone, lovingly preserved, which tell us of distant kings and conquest of astronomy and dreams.
Today we build from steel, concrete, and glass. Our digital media is designed to last 20 years -- perhaps 100 years, tops. It is plastic, mostly photo sensitive. Most working data is etched invisibly as miniscule loci of magnetic polarity-shifts, packed together on thin substrate on aluminum platters spinning in near-vacuum.
Our scientisis are squinting through electron tunneling microscopes, gently prodding single molecules with tiny movements like a dung beetle rolling its treasure up a hill.
We could etch the Bible on the head of a pin, so small there would be plenty of room for several angels, besides.
I have a book printed in 1902 whose binding is firm, pages a smooth firm, uniform mustard color.
I have a book printed in 1992, whose brilliant white smooth pages have long since turned rough, pages are almost brown, the leafs easily detaching from the spine at the gentlest tug.
I originally wrote this some 12 years go, I distinctly remember typing these words; but I am typing them again because searches through hundreds of files in dozens of accumulated directories yielded not one occurence of a remembered phrase.
Several times in the last 10 years, I have suffered complete disk crashes; once the data was recovered at great cost, once a fileset months-old was restored from tape; most of the time, everything was mirrored on adjacent disks, some things are gone forever.
Nothing is being carved in stone. It is my wish that upon my spiritual dissolution, my remains cleansed by fire, ashes where you may, no stone or crypt, I would rather join the ashes of campfires, drawn again up into the veins of trees, through their leafs, glimpse the sun again. No stone to record my name -- what use would it be without the tales I have told?
Tell me rather a silly story in a tiny village, than read ten million empty names.
AND THUS... 3,000 YEARS FROM THIS DAY, when people are curious to know what life was like in the past,
They will visit the pyramids of egypt, read the proud inscriptions of stone, lovingly preserved, telling them of distant kings and conquest of astronomy and dreams.
The rest of the world will be a strangely twisted heap of wonder and disaster... none will find words there.
Let my name be told to the wind, which is more than it deserves.
But please, kind stranger, tell my stories to your children, so some may remember threre was once one such as I. ________
What will happen on the day Facebook goes down and people glance 'round and there are no photographs, there are no letters, no cassette tapes of young children's voices?
There are only vague memories, and a pile of crashed hard disks in the closet, each with a label with circles and arrows that says what each one is and what is on them, for that day you strike it rich and can afford recover the data...
Oops. The labels have fallen off. You are now extinct.
Your only hope for immortailty was to help build the Clock.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are a universe designer, the best way to DEFEAT anyone trying to "measure the energy of quantum particles and to calculate their cutoff point as energy is dispersed due to interactions with leetle microwaveses" is to
Add a small random time delay to all server responses to the SMTP RCPT, EXPN and VRFY directives.
The wily universe hackers will undoubtedly discover the delay and its purpose, but they will be unable to plot their time measurements in orthogonal space without distension of phase-space, the shifter knob coming off in their hands.
Unable to prove their neat little theory they will be compelled to insert another coin -- and another. As the walls of their prison laugh at them. That is how the Universe feeds.
"I'm a 40-year-old developer, and it's become apparent that my .NET skillset is woefully out of date"
Oh yeah?? I'm 48 and my skill set is so out of date that 'Microsoft dot-net' was just ONE of those little bumps on the road I passed on learning because I was so already behind the times.
I'm so behind the times -- that when you're done with it all you will find no place to park, people like me will have taken all the MIS-handicapped parking spaces. Bring your microsoft-dot-net challenged brain to the field of battle, we'll play bumper cars with our power chairs while our false teeth fall out and the technological world evolves around us. Then we'll get drunk and raise a glass to those poor young people agonizing over amazon.com's new API and whether Google will eat it alive and blow it out the backside. Sorry, I mean back-end.
Fools.
Then we'll go out for steak and cut it into little pieces while we laugh about SQL, how everything was almost totally transactional for so long and they still cannot get it quite right. How RS-232 is dying and nothing out there is robust enough to replace it under the extreme conditions of the real world. How in place of a Real Wire laid by Real Men to solve Real Problems, now everybody's going wireless and clueless and things stop working when granny parks her pickup truck on the curb.
How all the cellphones in the world will some day stop working, all at once, for the same reason -- or just no reason at all.
And they will slap their tiny useless phones and look around at the corroded wire infrastructure that once was the Bell Telephone Network where the rest of the world could break into little pieces and the people in your own home town could still get dial tones and call each other.
When I was 15 years old I was maintaining S-100 computers. This was even before CP/M added the 'userarea' command. Then it all changed. Try PIP-ing from one user area to another without PIP-ping PIP first.
I've spent my whole life in over my head, behind the times, washed out, faking it, using blunt software tools to perform delicate surgery (registry corruption? Boot from linux and delete the whole damned hive)
And you're upset that microsoft-dot-net has passed you by? Take heart my friend, dot-net is just a fart in a high wind. It will not matter in ten thousand years.
Spend time with your children.
Life may not be all you want
but it's all you got
So stick a flower in your belly button
and be happy.
Active acoustic cancellation would only really work below 100hz. Either the source needs to be acquired directionally by microphone then inverted and rebroadcast wide field (would not work for traffic) ... OR the source captured outside then inverted and rebroadcast directionally/directly (as is done with cancelling headphones)... you cannot cancel reliably wide angle to wide angle unless there is some delaying directional component in the conduit, such as if your room is at the end of a sound conducting corridor. Try it and you will get strange feedback that curdles milk. You might however be able to create a narrow directional 'cone of silence' within a room however. Things might sound strange at the boundaries of the cone.
Version Control is like a very long cat. You pull the latest stable version off in New York, meanwhile an unstable beta is mewing in Los Angeles. Version Control is the same, only there is no cat.
'Cui bono' test for Iran: LOW
What? They're going to make off with virtual sacks of money?
What a coincidence that they decided to launch this soft attack while real military hardware is converging on their location.
Ramping anti-Iran sentiment via false flag hacking tricks: HIGH
It's what we do, it's what the Israelis do. Proudly and loudly.
But not in this particular instance, right?
It's a test to see what you're willing to believe.
be still my beating heart
hurricane schmirricane
DO YOU REALIZE that because hurrricanes make everyone take cover and keep the idiots off the roads, there are far fewer deaths from the hurricane than would have been traffic fatalities during that period. HURRICANES SAVE LIVES. they treat potential for disaster as disaster
shows a short circuit in the risk assessment
misdirected erudition with emotional angst
Katrina: "It's a hurricane, this things goona get us!"
SHOULD HAVE BEEN: "Look Marge, the City is below sea level. This is gonna get us."
Fukushima: "Evil radiation meltdown sub-Denver levels bad bad bad fear doom Nature hates us!"
SHOULD HAVE BEEN: "Look Marge, all the backup generators are in the basement not protected by a watertight door. This is dumb in a way that has nothing to do with radiation."
brains are broke
cannot think
call it like it is
The only problem is, once you've defeated the keyless entry and anti-theft systems you are left with a luxury BMW, which has power windows.
I hate power windows.
I find it ironic that an approach with a proven track record, Mutual Assured Destruction, has been lambasted as some sort of cold-war artifact, of intrinsic evil. The threat of Armageddon is the evil, MAD was the preventative. The United States of America was even founded on it. The 'armed militia model' where the empire and an armed populace, each with the power to hold the other in check -- the whole quotable 'We the People' litany -- is just a flowery and (to our ears) archaically quaint way of introducing the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction as a deterrent to tyranny. In a practical and historical sense MAD is the only device capable of holding peoples in restraint, long enough that the meme of self-restraint might creep into the culture.
It's just like guns. We've seen Sum of All Fears. There are presently enough loose nuke warheads and 'nuclear partners' to make them, to keep the world supplied with little boomers like the one that took out Baltimore Stadium -- for thousands of years of dirty little tricks and false flag pranks. Why not accept that as a 'given' rather than participating in escalating campaigns of denial? It's like turning in all the guns... and of course we were only joking last time, this time we'll get all of them, another historical circus recursus which always seems to distill into a "You first, we'll reconsider later" policy.
Then there is the business of generating energy. Nuclear Fission is the only -- only! only! -- thing on the table that could keep the grid up through some long, dark winter of inclement weather with limited or no transportation infrastructure operating. Neither solar, nor wind nor great rail-transported volume of coal passes this simple test. Nuclear plants are self contained and require only occasional delivery of fuel, which could be carried by mule train (a big slow one but hey, it's possible and I'd love to see that)
Which is why I get pissed whenever my country goes ballistic on nuclear energy programs around the world. In a country like Iran nuclear energy is the only way to ensure a peaceful future because you can guard shipments of nuclear fuel, you can harden security around plants, but no one will ever be able to protect liquid or gas pipelines. Never mind the oil in the ground. What hope do they (or anyone) have for stability? Aside from being stupid, I consider the US's policy on nuclear development tantamount to terrorism itself. Like regulating, confiscating and blocking distribution of penicillin.
Special note to the Japanese: please do not put your emergency backup generators in a basement at sea level with no watertight doors or bulkheads protecting them from complete immersion. All the haughty discussion about 'is nuclear a good idea' re: Fukushima is smoke and mirrors, Fukushima was a 19th-century 'FAIL' in terms of how simply it could have been prevented. Yes, I'm talking about steel doors and rubber seals! It really is THAT simple! Some 19th century steel door and rubber seal technology would have changed everything. Merely a mess, not a disaster.
Also good reading, http://it.slashdot.org/story/04/05/29/2242203/the-worlds-most-dangerous-password
The idea of elections with no forensically unique paper ballot or running printed tape -- ridiculous the day it was proposed. Where were the smart people then?? Now??
Being an established computer consultant, I got to provide input when the US Virgin Islands' election system was upgraded, a good friend on the Board of Elections brought over a bunch of brochures for me to review one evening in 1985. There were chad systems ("Punch cards? You must be joking!") There were optical zoned page scanners and push-button machines ("Where's the paper trail? Do you know what a 'hacker' is?" "It's available but 'costs extra'. Are these people for real??").
My friend and I agreed -- his vote on the Board of Elections -- was to keep the paper ballot. People are used to it. If anything, beef up the security and oversight surrounding transport of ballots cast; use bleeding-edge technology cautiously and wisely: do the counting of paper ballots with optical readers. Because just like the money counter machines, you can do it again quickly to see if you get the same result. And if the machines break and the power goes out -- the election process is 'safe', breezes along as smoothly as ever -- only the results are delayed.
Just WHEN was it decided that election results needed to be tallied in hours or minutes? From where did the pressure arise such that hand counting of paper ballots (or in the least, optical scan of same) is too slow? That we instead impose few-vendor centralized no-paper systems that are inherently hackable?
Here's the test I impose. A paper ballot system may also have its problems -- BIG BUT -- any given layman you bring in off the street to observe the tally process will have a clear view of a ballot box's chain of custody. Any layman observing the subsequent counting of those ballots (by hand or optical reader, with verification of random batches to test the reader) has a clear grasp of the process, and can tell whether the system is honest.
If it's Democracy you want, use as simple a voting/tally system as possible; for the tally process use as many human beings as possible, local volunteers as participants and observers.
If it's Oligarchy you want, go ahead and totally castrate the process of transparency by implementing insecurity through obscurity, touch screen BS with no hope of verification or recount.
The idea of all-electronic voting really should have been laughed out of the room, once upon a time. This is coming from a techie who favors modernization in other areas of society.
My friend on the Board was voted down: they decided to purchase push-button machines from Shouptronics... but at least the each station had its own built-in battery backup and built in receipt-type printer that ran a paper tape. Unlike most today.
whether whitespace broadband will be success. The Emperors are just now arriving at the rookery sites and mating will soon commence. After eggs are transfered to the males and the females go off to feed, expect some early indications July at the earliest to see how many eggs have survived the difficult incubation period. During total whiteout conditions of deep Antarctic winter they will huddle together in the whitespace. If too many eggs have frozen or dropped onto the ice the telecoms may as well hang it all up. September is when we'll know for sure if the spectrum left over from old telly channels can store enough fish goo for regurgitation. In December the grown chicks will be off we'll have a real fledge count to go on. I hope they will be big and fat so we all can get more throughput.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4atG0iNgbiU
L5: First city in space
Who said anything about a planet?
Spin a ring to Earth gravity, put up a few mirrors... or dome a crater on the moon with a thick lens of water to stop gamma rays, stock it with fish... in lunar gravity at one atmosphere trees would reach gigantic proportions, people could strap on wings and fly...
True, true -- it isn't, but there are stopgap measures such as breeder reactors and "enhanced burnup" ["Up to a third of all electricity produced in the current US reactor fleet comes from bred fuel, and the industry is working steadily to increase that percentage as time goes on."] Ultimately off-world sources (alas not the moon, insufficient concentrations of heavy elements) or some Really-Better-Than-Fissile-Nuclear energy option when it comes along. I believe fission is the only thing that will buy us enough time.
Sorry for the rant and thread drift, thanks for the reply.
Yeah, let us engage in elaborate engineering works to discover the geological consequences of fracking with 'dormant' volcanoes -- what a valuable learning experience. Spend untold millions over 50 years to go for that grail of 10% electrical production.
Meanwhile, 103 out-dated nuclear power plants are presently generating 20% of the whole grid, TODAY. With state-of-the-art designs, some up-scaling nuclear could generate 101% of the grid TOMORROW (ok well, let's say 10-15 years...)
The thing never discussed along with geothermal energy potential is the highly corrosive environment that the turbines must work with. The thing never discussed along with wind potential the laughably impossible task of keeping enough generators working at any one time -- to accomplish anything other than fleecing the customer and keep the subsidies flowing.
Photonic Solar Energy does not scale, and the first climate/volcanic cloud cover event is the end of civilization. The only way solar could scale to current demand (and penetrate cloud cover) is if it were captured in geosynchronous orbit and beamed to earth stations in a diffuse beam of microwaves. But then you have a SINGLE entity in control of world power generation which is another name for 'one world government' -- any takers?
These alternative-to-nuclear energy methods are mental lollipops to suck on while we delay making a decision. Success and survival if we go nuclear, failure and endless war over oil if we don't.
Note to human race: go seriously nuclear soon alreay, or die.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (The Times of London)
Dear Sir,
I am firmly opposed to the spread of microchips either to the home or to the office. We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive unemployment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry.
Yours faithfully,
Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J. P.
Sevenoaks
P.S.
Verily, I should hasten to mention that Twitter does aid and abet Terrorism.
"...How can inventor-entrepreneurs like Edison make a profit if every time they try to make a technological advance some nut in Congress pulls the rug out from under the them and their breakthroughs...?"
Oh yeah, I'm SHUURE Edison would be SO happy with the Federal Government placing a moratorium on the sale of an existing major product, one which at least half of all consumers prefer to the new. Rather than releasing both and letting the market decide.
/SARCASM
What's with this scourge of Digital Minimalism?
Are our neurons so heavily jaded or taxed by lush vibrant reality which surrounds us, that we achieve some mental orgasma at the sight of some crappy pixelated model of real-life process...? Building with Lego is like, well, uninventing the wheel. Seeing the world through Nintendo glasses.
Or its evil cousin Digital All-or-Nothingism promoted by kindergarten FAIL engineers which has killed broadcast television. DIGITAL TV IS LEGO TV. Where you once had a graceful degradation curve in fringe areas in which an analog television broadcast would go progressively snowy but still viewable (audio still perfect!) over a large area... now you have a useless and terrifying eruption of multicolored boxes accompanied by spurts of silence and blackscreen. If this is progress I'm a blockhead. Just hope them bastards keep their LEGO mitts off of analog FM.
Remember Bell Standard Practices, the smooth audio response curve of analog telephone equipment... balanced pairs, the digital fixed rate ~56k as the rule. The days of long distance dialup BBS where even complex tone protocols could be reliable. Now we have turkey garble bizzlefart cell phones and even long distance circuits for wire telephone providers use gibbering poop compression. Voices sploitch and gurgle like a death rattle. Music on hold sounds like continuous projectile vomit. "MODERN" DIGITAL TELEPHONY IS LEGO TELEPHONY.
And don't get me started about digital "cameras" as opposed to film. The great great grandchildren will think granny was made out of LEGO blocks, the way she looks when they zoom in close. When you zoom in with film people become grainy but they're still, well, people, not nightmarish pixelcritters with beady eyes. Matthew Brady is sobbing in his grave.
Where is it all going? Eventually the whole world will dissolve into a simple square wave like the red pill scene in Matrix and finally the whole universe will go DC. All of existence compressed into one bit.
We are the hollow men
We are the LEGO men
Stuck together
Edges sharp and painful underfoot. Alas!
Our crappy digital voices, when
We whisper together
are rendered as unintelligible by codec errors
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellular
This is the way the conversation ends
This is the way the conversation ends
This is the way the conversation ends
Not by bang or whimper: with a turkey fart.
Digital storage media for long term -- which I'd take as a human lifespan at least -- simply does not exist right now. It just hasn't been a priority in consumer based technologies, and is not likely to become one any time soon. Even if it did exist it would be expensive, reliance on it alone would not work, any single titanium box of gold plated discs would end up in a landfill somewhere the first time a marriage ends badly.
Only family based tradition can bridge time with assurance. There must be some one to gather the material, decide on the medium and see that the copies are tested and the collection is updated regularly. Also at least one other 'backup librarian' person -- preferably far away -- holding a copy. In every generation there should be one 'primary' and one 'backup' librarian. Consider the role of primary librarian as one not be taken lightly, which deserves the respect of (and occasional monetary support from) the entire family.
What I am saying is, it is not enough for everyone in a large family to acknowledge to one another, "You have a bunch of stuff, so do I, I'll send you mine some day, or..." Some day never comes. People forget. Disks crash. Only someone so designated as 'librarian' emowered with personal responsibility who follows a ritualistic backup/mirror strategy can make it work.
Choose some modern but cheap medium, for example 500GB or 1TB external USB drives. Get three of them, A B & C. Put the whole collection on each and send 'C' to the backup librarian. During the year write new material to 'A', mirror the changes to 'B' occasionally. At the end of the year mail 'B' to the backup librarian, upon receipt they mail back 'C' which you also bring up to date. You keep swapping 'B' and 'C' through the mail, only one in transit at any time. Of course, the failure of any disk demands immediate replacement.
A paper document and personal letter from you explaining the collection and instructions for keeping it up to date should be kept with each drive... so even if the scheme does not work out, some descendant might read it and be moved to salvage the data and carry the tradition forward.
As the years go by no doubt better mediums and methods will be available... but once you have gathered and built your Collection, mirrored and have a backup copy far away you can say to yourself, "That will be a task for a future librarian." and take pride in the statement! For you have done much more than just gathered and written some stuff... you have created a 'mantle of responsibility' which is just a wetware based mechanism to see that the job is done.
Because WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE
http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=10474#10474
Signs of revolution: screaming or cries for change.
ON THIS DAY, when we seek answers as to what people were thinking 3,000 years ago,
We visit the pyramids of egypt, read the proud inscriptions of stone, lovingly preserved, which tell us of distant kings and conquest of astronomy and dreams.
Today we build from steel, concrete, and glass. Our digital media is designed to last 20 years -- perhaps 100 years, tops. It is plastic, mostly photo sensitive. Most working data is etched invisibly as miniscule loci of magnetic polarity-shifts, packed together on thin substrate on aluminum platters spinning in near-vacuum.
Our scientisis are squinting through electron tunneling microscopes, gently prodding single molecules with tiny movements like a dung beetle rolling its treasure up a hill.
We could etch the Bible on the head of a pin, so small there would be plenty of room for several angels, besides.
I have a book printed in 1902 whose binding is firm, pages a smooth firm, uniform mustard color.
I have a book printed in 1992, whose brilliant white smooth pages have long since turned rough, pages are almost brown, the leafs easily detaching from the spine at the gentlest tug.
I originally wrote this some 12 years go, I distinctly remember typing these words; but I am typing them again because searches through hundreds of files in dozens of accumulated directories yielded not one occurence of a remembered phrase.
Several times in the last 10 years, I have suffered complete disk crashes; once the data was recovered at great cost, once a fileset months-old was restored from tape; most of the time, everything was mirrored on adjacent disks, some things are gone forever.
Nothing is being carved in stone. It is my wish that upon my spiritual dissolution, my remains cleansed by fire, ashes where you may, no stone or crypt, I would rather join the ashes of campfires, drawn again up into the veins of trees, through their leafs, glimpse the sun again. No stone to record my name -- what use would it be without the tales I have told?
Tell me rather a silly story in a tiny village, than read ten million empty names.
AND THUS... 3,000 YEARS FROM THIS DAY, when people are curious to know what life was like in the past,
They will visit the pyramids of egypt, read the proud inscriptions of stone, lovingly preserved, telling them of distant kings and conquest of astronomy and dreams.
The rest of the world will be a strangely twisted heap of wonder and disaster... none will find words there.
Let my name be told to the wind, which is more than it deserves.
But please, kind stranger, tell my stories to your children, so some may remember threre was once one such as I.
________
What will happen on the day Facebook goes down and people glance 'round and there are no photographs, there are no letters, no cassette tapes of young children's voices?
There are only vague memories, and a pile of crashed hard disks in the closet, each with a label with circles and arrows that says what each one is and what is on them, for that day you strike it rich and can afford recover the data...
Oops. The labels have fallen off. You are now extinct.
Your only hope for immortailty was to help build the Clock.