It doesn't actually matter if a kid has never seen a reel-to-reel tape player. The thing about symbols is, eventually they can stop being metaphors and start to have meaning in *themselves*.
Take for example the ampersand, &. It's a stylized, abbreviated form of the Latin word "et", meaning "and". You probably didn't know that, but you don't need to know Latin to understand that & means "and". The Latin letter "B" comes from the Phoenecian letter "bet" which also means "house", possibly because the letter once looked a bit like one. At this point the symbol is so far removed from its origin that we're not sure, but nobody cares. The Japanese katakana and hiragana writing systems work in a similar way: they're simplified versions of characters derived from Chinese symbols, and originally represented a word that starts with a certain sound. But now they just stand for the sound itself.
The same thing is happening with icons. 200 years from now, nobody will know what magnetic tape was, but so long as my new phone uses the same symbol for "voicemail" that my last one did, I'll be able to use it just fine.
You want more bandwidth? That's cool. So does everybody else. FCC should be auctioning off *every* section of commercial spectrum on a rotating 5-10 year cycle. If the cell phone companies can outbid the TV stations, goodbye Channel 13.
(By "commercial spectrum", I mean stuff not reserved by FCC for government, scientific, or amateur use, or bound by global treaty.)
We definitely need to train an elite corps of cyberwarfare personnel to deal with this sort of threat. I propose dividing the corps up into three tactical teams:
Alpha Team will carry out recon and patrol duties, identifying computer systems responsible for controlling potentially dangerous hardware systems. Bravo Team is responsible for extraction and isolation. Their mission is to walk up to these machines and unplug them from the Internet. Charlie Team is the counterinsertion team. They will be equipped with Mk 47 Hot Glue Guns. They will fill all available USB and network jacks on these computers with hot glue.
That's it. Screw high tech cybersecurity, system patches, and all that bullshit. Just unplug 'em and permanently destroy all I/O paths to the outside world.
But it's still cheaper and easier to use google apps (a) No, not if you have competent IT staff, it's not and (b) should universities REALLY have email service provided by the lowest bidder?
Google Apps for Education is free. Free as in $0. It is, by definition, cheaper than anything involving local personnel. Unless you want student volunteers managing e-mail, and even then you've gotta pay for hardware.
You can say that going with Google Apps is penny wise, pound foolish, but it's not your decision. College administrations are forcing their IT departments to provide more service with less money: the IT department's job is to do the best it can under those restrictions.
I'm on the faculty committee evaluating this option for my small liberal arts college. For us, it's a no brainer: a) We get a significantly better user experience than our existing software. You call Google "minimally acceptable quality", but its availability, user interface, storage, spam filtering, and speed are significant improvements over what we have. You might be able to install a homegrown service that's better than Google, but we can't afford to hire you. The administration is asking our IT department to do more with less, not more with more. b) The amount of cost savings for a small institution like us is huge. Our IT department has a technical staff of 6 people. One of them spends the majority of his time managing email. Switching to Google frees up 10-15% of our tech staff person-hours. c) While our college legal staff is looking carefully at the details, so far we're satisfied with the privacy issues. The privacy policy for Google Apps for Education is significantly stronger than your ordinary Gmail account: see here. We believe that unauthorized privacy violations are *less* likely with Google than with a privately hosted system, because Google has a formal procedure for privacy control, and is too big to care about our content. (The on-campus IT guy has something to gain by reading the Provost's email. But Google doesn't give a shit about campus politics.) The parent post worries specifically about bribery and intimidation: I guarantee you a Google engineer is far more expensive to bribe/blackmail than our local sysadmin. d) Almost all of our users are using Gmail for their private communications anyway, to set up underage drinking parties, drug deals, and casual sex. If you ask them whether they trust Google to manage their conversations with professors about overdue assignments, they look at you like you're an idiot.
This guy owes the Home Office bureaucrat who made this decision a percentage of his future revenues, because his career is *made*. "LEARN SELF DEFENSE FROM THE MAN JUDGED TOO LETHAL TO ENTER THE UK!"
Despite my/our disagreement being with Part 3, we get slandered and our words are twisted around into being deniers of Part 1 or Part 2. Very annoying.
Since this seems to be a real problem for you, let me come out in support: I'm a global warming "believer", and I say your position is perfectly respectable. I teach a college class on climate change, and on day 1 of the class I divide things up along exactly the same lines you do, and say that as a climate scientist I'm going to give lectures on Parts 1 and 2, but Part 3 is a matter of morality and economics, not science, and is something each student needs to decide on their own.
I happen to think you're wrong on Part 3, but if every opponent of climate change intervention thought along the lines you do, I'd be a happy man. The problem is the incredibly huge number of people who deny parts 1 and 2. I apologize on behalf of my side if we occasionally mistake you for a lunatic, but... let's just say it's a target rich environment.
Reports like this are like a tin can on a fence for anti global warming people. At the time I write this, I see dozens of posts saying "and now all the global warming people will take this as proof", and not one global warming person taking it as proof.
For the record, this is not proof of global warming. It is a very extreme regional climate event of the type that climate change theory predicts will become common, but you can't attribute individual events to the long-term trend.
For the record, this means jack diddly in terms of global temperature change, the contiguous US is too small to matter. The past 3 months did not set a global record. However, it has been pretty warm: global temperature this year so far is in the top 25%... just like every other year this century.
You're right, that something can be done with this. But the original poster's point was that "This will never work the way you want it to." Not that it can never work, but it's a hell of a lot more complicated than anyone would hope. My post was intended to show just how badly "the way you want it to work" fails.
Not really. The focal length is the *minimum* distance at which light can be focused, if the object you're imaging is infinitely far away. If you add up the overall length, from object to lens to detector, the minimum length is 4 * f = 600 km.
But hyperbole or no, I was going for an order-of-magnitude estimate. Anything over 100 m would prove the point.
Agree. Even if you do it with depleted uranium, and you suppose the "virtual electron effect" increases in proportional to the square of the number of protons in the nucleus, you might get an index of refraction in the ballpark of n = 1.000000033. Applying the lensmaker's formula, a convex lens with radii of curvature of 1 cm will have a focal length of....
150 kilometers.
So the gamma ray imaging camera you want to build for airport security will have to be roughly the same size as your flight. No, not the length of the plane, the mileage.
Also worth pointing out that even if a red dwarf planet's orbit were perturbed by other worlds, as is the case with Io, you won't get strong heating. The distances between a red dwarf's planets will be far larger than the distance between Jupiter's moons, so the orbital perturbations will be much *much* weaker.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the US setting this up in Europe. Isn't that something, oh, those countries should be doing on their own if they want it?
Because the only reason European countries are at risk of getting nuked in the first place is because of their strategic and military alliances with us. So (the argument goes) we owe it to them to protect them.
So yeah, Russia has enough missiles that they can trivially overwhelm any missile defense shield if it comes to all-out global war. And any nuclear war between the US and Russia will be global. So why do they care about this?
Maybe they're trying to provide some muscle for their friends. Russia is on very good terms with Iran, and stands to gain if the US gets entangled in conflicts with other small nuclear nations. So maybe they've got a deal: Iran gives Russia favorable trade deals, Russia waves its military dick around for Iran's benefit.
NASA, you know I love you, but it's time for an intervention.
It's time to stop pretending to be surprised every time you find evidence for water on Mars. The evidence for a persistently wet -- or at least damp -- ancient Mars has been indisputable for a decade. Move your press releases beyond that, to the same questions you're asking in the scientific literature: just how much water, when, and for how long?
There's a disconnect between principle and practice here. Authorities should absolutely be able to disable communications in "extreme circumstances where harm and destruction are imminent". A cell-phone triggered bomb on the train, for example.
But what does that have to do with last August's shutdown? Harm and violence were not imminent in that case. You'd be hard-pressed to argue that violence was even *likely*.
We have given the authorities tools to use to stop mass violence -- everything from telecomms control to tear gas. But using those tools *before* the violence starts is always an abuse of power.
Just FYI, "patsy" is not the same as "pansy". He's talking about their *ability* to carry out attacks without help, not their courage. "Pansies" might eventually succeed at terror, but "patsies" couldn't tie their own shoebomb without help.
Also, cerebellum is not cerebrum, but that's not important.
My point is that sci-fi has so *many* different Big Ideas, it's annoying that its serious reviewers and fans tend to focus only on the human identity question. I think they do so to emulate and prove themselves to pompous high literature devotees, who don't ask about other big ideas because their own genre has so little else to offer.
Don't think of your home network the way you think of your work network. Buy a small consumer wifi router with a few RJ45 jacks (Linksys or whatever), run cable between your office and your media room, and use wifi everywhere else. Keep your "server" in your office.
I don't care how big a network nerd you are at work, there is no possible way you're going to saturate a home network built on wireless-N and gigabit ethernet. And while having a 4U server in your basement may make your work buddies grunt with approval, I guarantee you it'd be much more convenient and useful to have the same crap in a mid-size tower desktop in your office.
I am so sick of "the exploration of human identity" being the only question worth pursuing when discussing works of art. It seems like the only thing we expect of art is that it help us answer the question of what it means to be human, and it's not like anyone can articulate a straight answer to that question, except in that the art itself is its own irreducible answer. It's a "tree falls in the forest" kind of question: its main purpose is to make the person asking it look smart; no answer is required.
Sci-fi fandom is especially guilty of pushing this sort of treacle. But let's be honest here: human identity issues are not the most interesting aspect of Star Wars, and Star Wars is not a very interesting subject for the exploration of human identity. If you want to talk about what it means to be human, talk about District 9 and Source Code, just to pick two recent examples. And if you want to talk about Star Wars, let's talk about whether our own lives are all just sequels to our parents' stories.
But I get it. You just want to capitalize on a mass-market intellectual property to drive attendance at your science museum. Well, you can do it without the pompous psychobabble.
As I posted elsewhere, it's important to distinguish between what serious climate scientists are saying (which lines up with your post) and what Lovelock was forecasting: he predicted near-total annihilation of the human race, and the Earth rendered uninhabitable except for the poles.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't actually matter if a kid has never seen a reel-to-reel tape player. The thing about symbols is, eventually they can stop being metaphors and start to have meaning in *themselves*.
Take for example the ampersand, &. It's a stylized, abbreviated form of the Latin word "et", meaning "and". You probably didn't know that, but you don't need to know Latin to understand that & means "and". The Latin letter "B" comes from the Phoenecian letter "bet" which also means "house", possibly because the letter once looked a bit like one. At this point the symbol is so far removed from its origin that we're not sure, but nobody cares. The Japanese katakana and hiragana writing systems work in a similar way: they're simplified versions of characters derived from Chinese symbols, and originally represented a word that starts with a certain sound. But now they just stand for the sound itself.
The same thing is happening with icons. 200 years from now, nobody will know what magnetic tape was, but so long as my new phone uses the same symbol for "voicemail" that my last one did, I'll be able to use it just fine.
You want more bandwidth? That's cool. So does everybody else. FCC should be auctioning off *every* section of commercial spectrum on a rotating 5-10 year cycle. If the cell phone companies can outbid the TV stations, goodbye Channel 13.
(By "commercial spectrum", I mean stuff not reserved by FCC for government, scientific, or amateur use, or bound by global treaty.)
If your reactor works this way, you had a serious safety problem long before I came in with the glue gun. I just made it obvious, so you're welcome.
We definitely need to train an elite corps of cyberwarfare personnel to deal with this sort of threat. I propose dividing the corps up into three tactical teams:
Alpha Team will carry out recon and patrol duties, identifying computer systems responsible for controlling potentially dangerous hardware systems.
Bravo Team is responsible for extraction and isolation. Their mission is to walk up to these machines and unplug them from the Internet.
Charlie Team is the counterinsertion team. They will be equipped with Mk 47 Hot Glue Guns. They will fill all available USB and network jacks on these computers with hot glue.
That's it. Screw high tech cybersecurity, system patches, and all that bullshit. Just unplug 'em and permanently destroy all I/O paths to the outside world.
Google Apps for Education is free. Free as in $0. It is, by definition, cheaper than anything involving local personnel. Unless you want student volunteers managing e-mail, and even then you've gotta pay for hardware.
You can say that going with Google Apps is penny wise, pound foolish, but it's not your decision. College administrations are forcing their IT departments to provide more service with less money: the IT department's job is to do the best it can under those restrictions.
I'm on the faculty committee evaluating this option for my small liberal arts college. For us, it's a no brainer:
a) We get a significantly better user experience than our existing software. You call Google "minimally acceptable quality", but its availability, user interface, storage, spam filtering, and speed are significant improvements over what we have. You might be able to install a homegrown service that's better than Google, but we can't afford to hire you. The administration is asking our IT department to do more with less, not more with more.
b) The amount of cost savings for a small institution like us is huge. Our IT department has a technical staff of 6 people. One of them spends the majority of his time managing email. Switching to Google frees up 10-15% of our tech staff person-hours.
c) While our college legal staff is looking carefully at the details, so far we're satisfied with the privacy issues. The privacy policy for Google Apps for Education is significantly stronger than your ordinary Gmail account: see here. We believe that unauthorized privacy violations are *less* likely with Google than with a privately hosted system, because Google has a formal procedure for privacy control, and is too big to care about our content. (The on-campus IT guy has something to gain by reading the Provost's email. But Google doesn't give a shit about campus politics.) The parent post worries specifically about bribery and intimidation: I guarantee you a Google engineer is far more expensive to bribe/blackmail than our local sysadmin.
d) Almost all of our users are using Gmail for their private communications anyway, to set up underage drinking parties, drug deals, and casual sex. If you ask them whether they trust Google to manage their conversations with professors about overdue assignments, they look at you like you're an idiot.
This guy owes the Home Office bureaucrat who made this decision a percentage of his future revenues, because his career is *made*. "LEARN SELF DEFENSE FROM THE MAN JUDGED TOO LETHAL TO ENTER THE UK!"
Since this seems to be a real problem for you, let me come out in support: I'm a global warming "believer", and I say your position is perfectly respectable. I teach a college class on climate change, and on day 1 of the class I divide things up along exactly the same lines you do, and say that as a climate scientist I'm going to give lectures on Parts 1 and 2, but Part 3 is a matter of morality and economics, not science, and is something each student needs to decide on their own.
I happen to think you're wrong on Part 3, but if every opponent of climate change intervention thought along the lines you do, I'd be a happy man. The problem is the incredibly huge number of people who deny parts 1 and 2. I apologize on behalf of my side if we occasionally mistake you for a lunatic, but ... let's just say it's a target rich environment.
Reports like this are like a tin can on a fence for anti global warming people. At the time I write this, I see dozens of posts saying "and now all the global warming people will take this as proof", and not one global warming person taking it as proof.
For the record, this is not proof of global warming. It is a very extreme regional climate event of the type that climate change theory predicts will become common, but you can't attribute individual events to the long-term trend.
For the record, this means jack diddly in terms of global temperature change, the contiguous US is too small to matter. The past 3 months did not set a global record. However, it has been pretty warm: global temperature this year so far is in the top 25%... just like every other year this century.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/
Nobody presented it as proof of AWG. It says so in the goddamned summary.
Wait, AWG? I don't think the American Wire Gauge is in dispute here.
See my reply to a similar post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2837391&cid=39942977
You're right, that something can be done with this. But the original poster's point was that "This will never work the way you want it to." Not that it can never work, but it's a hell of a lot more complicated than anyone would hope. My post was intended to show just how badly "the way you want it to work" fails.
Not really. The focal length is the *minimum* distance at which light can be focused, if the object you're imaging is infinitely far away. If you add up the overall length, from object to lens to detector, the minimum length is 4 * f = 600 km.
But hyperbole or no, I was going for an order-of-magnitude estimate. Anything over 100 m would prove the point.
Agree. Even if you do it with depleted uranium, and you suppose the "virtual electron effect" increases in proportional to the square of the number of protons in the nucleus, you might get an index of refraction in the ballpark of n = 1.000000033. Applying the lensmaker's formula, a convex lens with radii of curvature of 1 cm will have a focal length of ....
150 kilometers.
So the gamma ray imaging camera you want to build for airport security will have to be roughly the same size as your flight. No, not the length of the plane, the mileage.
Also worth pointing out that even if a red dwarf planet's orbit were perturbed by other worlds, as is the case with Io, you won't get strong heating. The distances between a red dwarf's planets will be far larger than the distance between Jupiter's moons, so the orbital perturbations will be much *much* weaker.
Because the only reason European countries are at risk of getting nuked in the first place is because of their strategic and military alliances with us. So (the argument goes) we owe it to them to protect them.
So yeah, Russia has enough missiles that they can trivially overwhelm any missile defense shield if it comes to all-out global war. And any nuclear war between the US and Russia will be global. So why do they care about this?
Maybe they're trying to provide some muscle for their friends. Russia is on very good terms with Iran, and stands to gain if the US gets entangled in conflicts with other small nuclear nations. So maybe they've got a deal: Iran gives Russia favorable trade deals, Russia waves its military dick around for Iran's benefit.
NASA, you know I love you, but it's time for an intervention.
It's time to stop pretending to be surprised every time you find evidence for water on Mars. The evidence for a persistently wet -- or at least damp -- ancient Mars has been indisputable for a decade. Move your press releases beyond that, to the same questions you're asking in the scientific literature: just how much water, when, and for how long?
There's a disconnect between principle and practice here. Authorities should absolutely be able to disable communications in "extreme circumstances where harm and destruction are imminent". A cell-phone triggered bomb on the train, for example.
But what does that have to do with last August's shutdown? Harm and violence were not imminent in that case. You'd be hard-pressed to argue that violence was even *likely*.
We have given the authorities tools to use to stop mass violence -- everything from telecomms control to tear gas. But using those tools *before* the violence starts is always an abuse of power.
Shit happens. The question is, what do you do about it when you find out. If Jayson Blair worked for the FBI, he'd be Director by now.
Just FYI, "patsy" is not the same as "pansy". He's talking about their *ability* to carry out attacks without help, not their courage. "Pansies" might eventually succeed at terror, but "patsies" couldn't tie their own shoebomb without help.
Also, cerebellum is not cerebrum, but that's not important.
My point is that sci-fi has so *many* different Big Ideas, it's annoying that its serious reviewers and fans tend to focus only on the human identity question. I think they do so to emulate and prove themselves to pompous high literature devotees, who don't ask about other big ideas because their own genre has so little else to offer.
Don't think of your home network the way you think of your work network. Buy a small consumer wifi router with a few RJ45 jacks (Linksys or whatever), run cable between your office and your media room, and use wifi everywhere else. Keep your "server" in your office.
I don't care how big a network nerd you are at work, there is no possible way you're going to saturate a home network built on wireless-N and gigabit ethernet. And while having a 4U server in your basement may make your work buddies grunt with approval, I guarantee you it'd be much more convenient and useful to have the same crap in a mid-size tower desktop in your office.
I am so sick of "the exploration of human identity" being the only question worth pursuing when discussing works of art. It seems like the only thing we expect of art is that it help us answer the question of what it means to be human, and it's not like anyone can articulate a straight answer to that question, except in that the art itself is its own irreducible answer. It's a "tree falls in the forest" kind of question: its main purpose is to make the person asking it look smart; no answer is required.
Sci-fi fandom is especially guilty of pushing this sort of treacle. But let's be honest here: human identity issues are not the most interesting aspect of Star Wars, and Star Wars is not a very interesting subject for the exploration of human identity. If you want to talk about what it means to be human, talk about District 9 and Source Code, just to pick two recent examples. And if you want to talk about Star Wars, let's talk about whether our own lives are all just sequels to our parents' stories.
But I get it. You just want to capitalize on a mass-market intellectual property to drive attendance at your science museum. Well, you can do it without the pompous psychobabble.
As I posted elsewhere, it's important to distinguish between what serious climate scientists are saying (which lines up with your post) and what Lovelock was forecasting: he predicted near-total annihilation of the human race, and the Earth rendered uninhabitable except for the poles.