Weigh the risks of current nuclear technology, versus the risk of our ongoing coddling of vile Islamist regimes, like the Saudis. I know which one I would choose.
Not to shit all over their good work, but the most successful projects under the aegis of GNU, succeed _despite_ the neckbeards in Boston, not because of them.
If it's anything like the utter embarrassment of HURD (w.r.t. Linux kernel), these guys will still have some slow piece of crap that barely compiles, a long time after something else has built something far better, with a freer license, at a point that deep-learning is baked into absolutely everything around us -- just like Linux.
I think GNU themselves are too slow, dumb and doctrinaire to ever produce anything of value or impact ever again.
ESA and the European Union are two completely different organisation. This discussion comes up a lot when people get confused with the difference between the Council of Europe, and the European Council (one of the elements of the EU).
Military-scale violence cannot be done in half-measures -- one should only draw one's sword if he's going to use it, and then one is committed, forget all bullshit so-called "rules" -- fight to win and utterly crush and humiliate the enemy. In this sense, laws of war are counterproductive; it lowers the threshold of organised violence way too far, and we end up with a long list of pointless scuffles and police actions, and with a lot of the backwards parts of the world just hating us.
(Laws of war were invented by fucking-idiot country gentlemen in 1945, when we had just come out of a no-holds-barred mechanized, industrialized war, and it was disciplined Western armies fighting disciplined Western armies. The fact is, many of the people we fight, fight like animals, and they do not fight Marquis of Queensbury Rules...) These men were not men of vision -- they were fools who just like Versailles, sowed the seeds of future conflict.
If I were president of the world, we would have not gone into Iraq or even Afghanistan, but I certainly would have had IS cut to pieces, if they existed. Thanks to 9/11, we have the perverse situation where the Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, riled up the Muslim world; yet we now can't act decisively against the biggest bunch of fascists since the Nazis.
*facepalm*
I think we have something to learn from the Russians in this sense. They understand these aspects of using organised violence way better than the West does. I would be comparing notes with them -- they have good experience of losing, then winning spectacularly against Islamist opponents.
If you're going to have blood on your hands -- it'd better be for a damned good reason. I wish our so-called leaders would think way harder before resorting to force. There IS a time and place for force (human nature being the way it is), but it's getting used way too often.
For most people, out of sight is out of mind. And being across the Atlantic, it's easy for Americans to forget that Europe and the Islamic countries were locked in an existential struggle for millennia. Each has its own VERY different way of seeing the world, and a VERY different vision for the future.
They have COMPLETELY forgotten that the Muslims have _ALWAYS_ hated us. They hate us because we're white and Christian. They hate us because they think they should rule the world, and because by merely existing, we stand in their way and we are holding them away from their birthright (i.e. our stuff and our territory).
Americans (the left wing kind anyway), have a hard time seeing that some otherwise-reasonable people aren't friends, and aren't interested in being friends -- this is a big blind-spot in the American psyche. They think that everyone else is civilized like they are, and it's a total head-fuck for them when illiterate backwards Third World peasants show up and (surprise! surprise!) start _behaving_ like entitled Third World peasants. These people see kindness as weakness to be exploited. We're seeing this in Europe right now -- with the millions of people showing up, demanding their handouts and free houses.
Without knowing the back-story, the Morrocan restaurant firebombing could've been intra-ethnic score-settling for all we know.
Muslims have had a beef with America as long as America has existed. Don't believe for a second that Muslims can't dish it out as good as they take it.
You're being disingenius about ISIL. ISIL is the same shit -- only the flies are different.
The white slave trade (where literally millions of white people were abducted into slavery by Muslims), has been whitewashed out of history. But the Muslims hate America, because America, very early on, ended the white slave trade by force.
American actions may have been counterproductive at times ("moderate" terrorists, *cough* *cough*), but Americans haven't waged war against Islam and Muslims per se; they have, however, fought dictators and extremists (just as they fought the Barbary pirates). If this upsets Muslims, then this reflects poorly on the Muslims, not Americans.
Islamists, if deprived of that excuse, would rapidly find another. "Foreign policy" is just a bullshit post-hoc justificiation -- and convenient, because they can force us to change our foreign policy to tip-toe around Muslims, so we have to tip-toe around them, and give them more free shit and lebensraum.
No quarter to fascists. We should be hanging the pigs, not making excuses for them.
There's progress on the materials front. But there's still tons of risk that needs to be retired.
It's a bit concerning though that nobody's built a working tritium breeding blanket yet. And afaict, ITER's test blanket module program is going to be a bit half-arsed. This should be a top priority.
Are the Ray Kurzweil and singularity fanbois / public masturbators off their meds again?
Fusion: D-T fuel is the best fuel for any prospective fusion power plant on the horizon. Heating and confinement are solved problems. Materials that can withstand the massive heat/radiation loads of working reactors are the biggest problems right now. These machines weigh hundreds of thousands of tons. You're NOT going to ship a fusion reactor into space any time soon.
Space: it costs tens of thousands of dollars a kilogram to ship stuff into LEO. And these stupid basement-dwellers are seriously talking about bootstrapping an ENTIRE industrial infrastructure in space to mine a resource which is actually an inferior fuel, for fusion plants that don't exist yet.
It should be a criminal offense (or at least happy-slappable offence) to air such inanity and stupidity in public.
When ITER ignites a plasma early next decade, people will be completely blindsided. Progress has actually been staggering -- the state-of-the-art in fusion triple-product has grown faster than Moore's Law for decades.
In the minds of laypeople, yes. There are quite a few other concepts that have been worked on over the years, none of which have any kind of public profile at all.
Heating (and confinement) are now basically solved problems in magnetic confinement machines. The Wikipedia article says that they'll be using bog-standing microwave heating (they don't say exactly what), and neutral-beam heating in W-7X.
Both tokamaks and stellarators have to 'twist' the magnetic field around the torus (since paths around the inside of the torus are smaller than the outside, leading to instabilities). Tokamaks achieve this by inducing a current through the plasma to induce the twist in the magnetic field using a huge solenoid or other means; stellarators use external coils.
The former are prone to catastrophic disruptions (which in extreme cases, can unleash strong forces that could, in the absolute worst case, physically break the machine); the latter are more stable, but much harder to manufacture.
Nope. With these kind of magnetic confinement machines and the way they scale, the bigger the better (quite literally).
This is why we need to build a stupendously huge and expensive machine like ITER to demonstrate anything approaching economic power output for the energy required to confine and heat the plasma.
There's nothing "new" about the stellarator at all.
I'm pretty sure that Lyman Spitzer came up with the idea at Princeton before the Russians did at the Kurchatov Institute. The only reason why the tokamak is more famous, is that the physics performance (particle, energy confinement) was for the longest time, way better in tokamaks (and may well still be). Also, tokamaks are way easier to build (but harder to operate).
That said, I've read suggestions that stellarators might be able to be optimised in ways that are impossible in tokamaks, pending further breakthroughs. The machines will still cost a fortune to build though -- and cost is going to be a BIG barrier to adoption of fusion as a power source at any rate.
China deserves at least a little credit; after all, they've lifted 100+ million people out of poverty -- the greatest poverty-relief effort that anybody's ever done in the history of the world.
Say what you will about the famously glass-jawed Chinese government and CCP; they **ARE** effective, and in this world, people care about results. If they can repeat the same trick in Africa, they'll be doing the world a massive favour.
You can't be serious about the crime rate: "not worse than Rome or Paris". You _do_ realize how bad the street crime rates in these cites are, don't you?
That besides: no, the Spanish might be as wet as fuck when it comes to non-violent crime, but I'm glad this doesn't hold for anything violent. The illegals know this -- they're not just refraining from violent crime because they are nice people...
You gotta remember that the Catalans keep electing left-wing lunatics into the Generalitat and into the city government, so they're always doing crazy stuff like that.
While the national government has a generally sensible policy of "not feeding the pigeons" with respect to illegals, the local government has always been full of ex-Communist and ex-Black Bloc lunatics.
The other stupid thing they do? They see robbers, pickpockets and scammers (the majority who are foreign criminals) as "victims", and never prosecute them. They just fine them and throw them back out onto the street. Result? Some of the highest rates of street crime of any major city on Earth, which threatens to destroy Barcelona's one big earner -- the tourist and conference trade.
The left-wingers don't care though: anybody who isn't white or local is a "victim", and therefore shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. The ironic racism of low expectations for brown people...
SourceSafe is an absolutely terrible choice, since it is actively user-hostile, and has the alarming habit of eating your source code at the worst possible time. Rational Clearcase is almost as bad.
I love Git myself, but for newbies who can only cope with a shallow learning curve, I'd make do with Subversion to begin with. At a recent employer, we adopted Subversion as a "gateway drug" to Git. Sometimes, you don't need anything more powerful than that.
He's specifically asking for a locally-hosted solution, unfortunately...
There are some great cloud-based offerings these days -- BitBucket will let you have free private repos for small teams (up to 10 people). The only problem I could see that (besides not being allowed by his IS department to consider a cloud-based solution), is that Git's user experience is not for amateurs, although that could be ameliorated somewhat, by using Attlassian's or Github's noob Git clients as "training wheels"...
As far as I can tell, you're describing the classic CVS or Subversion small team setup. You can run a server on the network (via Apache, or via SSH), run ViewCVS, set up checkin hooks, and give your clients a nice client like TortoiseCVS/TortoiseSVN built into Windows Explorer.
If you want integration with bug tracking tools, then have a look at Bugzilla and Bonsai.
All your users need to know about, is check in, and checkout, so the cognitive overhead is low.
It would take one engineer half a day to set all this stuff up on a spare machine, and you could try it out fairly quickly.
And best of all, this setup is gratis as well as Free. This has worked really nicely for me in both an academic and a commercial environment.
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Weigh the risks of current nuclear technology, versus the risk of our ongoing coddling of vile Islamist regimes, like the Saudis. I know which one I would choose.
Not to shit all over their good work, but the most successful projects under the aegis of GNU, succeed _despite_ the neckbeards in Boston, not because of them.
If it's anything like the utter embarrassment of HURD (w.r.t. Linux kernel), these guys will still have some slow piece of crap that barely compiles, a long time after something else has built something far better, with a freer license, at a point that deep-learning is baked into absolutely everything around us -- just like Linux.
I think GNU themselves are too slow, dumb and doctrinaire to ever produce anything of value or impact ever again.
ESA and the European Union are two completely different organisation. This discussion comes up a lot when people get confused with the difference between the Council of Europe, and the European Council (one of the elements of the EU).
Like Russian cybercrooks -- they are sensible enough to not shit where they eat.
Less trouble from law enforcement that way, and less chance of ending up getting a 7.62×39mm brain haemorrage, if you know what I mean...
The military is a broadsword, not a scalpel.
Military-scale violence cannot be done in half-measures -- one should only draw one's sword if he's going to use it, and then one is committed, forget all bullshit so-called "rules" -- fight to win and utterly crush and humiliate the enemy. In this sense, laws of war are counterproductive; it lowers the threshold of organised violence way too far, and we end up with a long list of pointless scuffles and police actions, and with a lot of the backwards parts of the world just hating us.
(Laws of war were invented by fucking-idiot country gentlemen in 1945, when we had just come out of a no-holds-barred mechanized, industrialized war, and it was disciplined Western armies fighting disciplined Western armies. The fact is, many of the people we fight, fight like animals, and they do not fight Marquis of Queensbury Rules...) These men were not men of vision -- they were fools who just like Versailles, sowed the seeds of future conflict.
If I were president of the world, we would have not gone into Iraq or even Afghanistan, but I certainly would have had IS cut to pieces, if they existed. Thanks to 9/11, we have the perverse situation where the Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, riled up the Muslim world; yet we now can't act decisively against the biggest bunch of fascists since the Nazis.
*facepalm*
I think we have something to learn from the Russians in this sense. They understand these aspects of using organised violence way better than the West does. I would be comparing notes with them -- they have good experience of losing, then winning spectacularly against Islamist opponents.
If you're going to have blood on your hands -- it'd better be for a damned good reason. I wish our so-called leaders would think way harder before resorting to force. There IS a time and place for force (human nature being the way it is), but it's getting used way too often.
Only for entertainment value.
Nobody with half a brain is taking foreign policy lectures off these clowns.
You pretty much nailed it.
For most people, out of sight is out of mind. And being across the Atlantic, it's easy for Americans to forget that Europe and the Islamic countries were locked in an existential struggle for millennia. Each has its own VERY different way of seeing the world, and a VERY different vision for the future.
They have COMPLETELY forgotten that the Muslims have _ALWAYS_ hated us. They hate us because we're white and Christian. They hate us because they think they should rule the world, and because by merely existing, we stand in their way and we are holding them away from their birthright (i.e. our stuff and our territory).
Americans (the left wing kind anyway), have a hard time seeing that some otherwise-reasonable people aren't friends, and aren't interested in being friends -- this is a big blind-spot in the American psyche. They think that everyone else is civilized like they are, and it's a total head-fuck for them when illiterate backwards Third World peasants show up and (surprise! surprise!) start _behaving_ like entitled Third World peasants. These people see kindness as weakness to be exploited. We're seeing this in Europe right now -- with the millions of people showing up, demanding their handouts and free houses.
There hasn't been a Crusade in a thousand years -- and there'll never be another.
This reads like paranoid street-level Arab crap.
Without knowing the back-story, the Morrocan restaurant firebombing could've been intra-ethnic score-settling for all we know.
Muslims have had a beef with America as long as America has existed. Don't believe for a second that Muslims can't dish it out as good as they take it.
You're being disingenius about ISIL. ISIL is the same shit -- only the flies are different.
The white slave trade (where literally millions of white people were abducted into slavery by Muslims), has been whitewashed out of history. But the Muslims hate America, because America, very early on, ended the white slave trade by force.
American actions may have been counterproductive at times ("moderate" terrorists, *cough* *cough*), but Americans haven't waged war against Islam and Muslims per se; they have, however, fought dictators and extremists (just as they fought the Barbary pirates). If this upsets Muslims, then this reflects poorly on the Muslims, not Americans.
You give these people way too much credit.
Get back to me when I can buy a fully-loaded AC130 gunship without an ID check.
Apples and oranges.
Blaming "foreign policy" is victim blaming
Islamists, if deprived of that excuse, would rapidly find another. "Foreign policy" is just a bullshit post-hoc justificiation -- and convenient, because they can force us to change our foreign policy to tip-toe around Muslims, so we have to tip-toe around them, and give them more free shit and lebensraum.
No quarter to fascists. We should be hanging the pigs, not making excuses for them.
There's progress on the materials front. But there's still tons of risk that needs to be retired.
It's a bit concerning though that nobody's built a working tritium breeding blanket yet. And afaict, ITER's test blanket module program is going to be a bit half-arsed. This should be a top priority.
Are the Ray Kurzweil and singularity fanbois / public masturbators off their meds again?
Fusion: D-T fuel is the best fuel for any prospective fusion power plant on the horizon. Heating and confinement are solved problems. Materials that can withstand the massive heat/radiation loads of working reactors are the biggest problems right now. These machines weigh hundreds of thousands of tons. You're NOT going to ship a fusion reactor into space any time soon.
Space: it costs tens of thousands of dollars a kilogram to ship stuff into LEO. And these stupid basement-dwellers are seriously talking about bootstrapping an ENTIRE industrial infrastructure in space to mine a resource which is actually an inferior fuel, for fusion plants that don't exist yet.
It should be a criminal offense (or at least happy-slappable offence) to air such inanity and stupidity in public.
That's what you think.
When ITER ignites a plasma early next decade, people will be completely blindsided. Progress has actually been staggering -- the state-of-the-art in fusion triple-product has grown faster than Moore's Law for decades.
In the minds of laypeople, yes. There are quite a few other concepts that have been worked on over the years, none of which have any kind of public profile at all.
Heating (and confinement) are now basically solved problems in magnetic confinement machines. The Wikipedia article says that they'll be using bog-standing microwave heating (they don't say exactly what), and neutral-beam heating in W-7X.
Both tokamaks and stellarators have to 'twist' the magnetic field around the torus (since paths around the inside of the torus are smaller than the outside, leading to instabilities). Tokamaks achieve this by inducing a current through the plasma to induce the twist in the magnetic field using a huge solenoid or other means; stellarators use external coils.
The former are prone to catastrophic disruptions (which in extreme cases, can unleash strong forces that could, in the absolute worst case, physically break the machine); the latter are more stable, but much harder to manufacture.
Nope. With these kind of magnetic confinement machines and the way they scale, the bigger the better (quite literally).
This is why we need to build a stupendously huge and expensive machine like ITER to demonstrate anything approaching economic power output for the energy required to confine and heat the plasma.
There's nothing "new" about the stellarator at all.
I'm pretty sure that Lyman Spitzer came up with the idea at Princeton before the Russians did at the Kurchatov Institute. The only reason why the tokamak is more famous, is that the physics performance (particle, energy confinement) was for the longest time, way better in tokamaks (and may well still be). Also, tokamaks are way easier to build (but harder to operate).
That said, I've read suggestions that stellarators might be able to be optimised in ways that are impossible in tokamaks, pending further breakthroughs. The machines will still cost a fortune to build though -- and cost is going to be a BIG barrier to adoption of fusion as a power source at any rate.
China deserves at least a little credit; after all, they've lifted 100+ million people out of poverty -- the greatest poverty-relief effort that anybody's ever done in the history of the world.
Say what you will about the famously glass-jawed Chinese government and CCP; they **ARE** effective, and in this world, people care about results. If they can repeat the same trick in Africa, they'll be doing the world a massive favour.
You can't be serious about the crime rate: "not worse than Rome or Paris". You _do_ realize how bad the street crime rates in these cites are, don't you?
That besides: no, the Spanish might be as wet as fuck when it comes to non-violent crime, but I'm glad this doesn't hold for anything violent. The illegals know this -- they're not just refraining from violent crime because they are nice people...
You gotta remember that the Catalans keep electing left-wing lunatics into the Generalitat and into the city government, so they're always doing crazy stuff like that.
While the national government has a generally sensible policy of "not feeding the pigeons" with respect to illegals, the local government has always been full of ex-Communist and ex-Black Bloc lunatics.
The other stupid thing they do? They see robbers, pickpockets and scammers (the majority who are foreign criminals) as "victims", and never prosecute them. They just fine them and throw them back out onto the street. Result? Some of the highest rates of street crime of any major city on Earth, which threatens to destroy Barcelona's one big earner -- the tourist and conference trade.
The left-wingers don't care though: anybody who isn't white or local is a "victim", and therefore shouldn't be held accountable for their actions. The ironic racism of low expectations for brown people...
Oh God, stay the fuck away from SourceSafe.
SourceSafe is an absolutely terrible choice, since it is actively user-hostile, and has the alarming habit of eating your source code at the worst possible time. Rational Clearcase is almost as bad.
I love Git myself, but for newbies who can only cope with a shallow learning curve, I'd make do with Subversion to begin with. At a recent employer, we adopted Subversion as a "gateway drug" to Git. Sometimes, you don't need anything more powerful than that.
He's specifically asking for a locally-hosted solution, unfortunately...
There are some great cloud-based offerings these days -- BitBucket will let you have free private repos for small teams (up to 10 people). The only problem I could see that (besides not being allowed by his IS department to consider a cloud-based solution), is that Git's user experience is not for amateurs, although that could be ameliorated somewhat, by using Attlassian's or Github's noob Git clients as "training wheels"...
As far as I can tell, you're describing the classic CVS or Subversion small team setup. You can run a server on the network (via Apache, or via SSH), run ViewCVS, set up checkin hooks, and give your clients a nice client like TortoiseCVS/TortoiseSVN built into Windows Explorer.
If you want integration with bug tracking tools, then have a look at Bugzilla and Bonsai.
All your users need to know about, is check in, and checkout, so the cognitive overhead is low.
It would take one engineer half a day to set all this stuff up on a spare machine, and you could try it out fairly quickly.
And best of all, this setup is gratis as well as Free. This has worked really nicely for me in both an academic and a commercial environment.