Depends. If you are working as IT technician in a company, you might find yourself installing something on a box reasonably frequently. On the other hand you would be installing it "for a reason" so you probably will end up with SuSE/Redhat for Oracle or (insert commercial product here). Same for desktops.
For debian servers in an IT environment, my impression is that most people skip dselect and install what they want through apt-get. Its trivial to make a quick list of packages you want on every server and run it through apt-get, then customize packages for the server's functions (web server gets apache, file server gets NFS, etc...)
You know, I've been thinking about this for a while. Greed isn't what gets you in the end. It's stupidity.
According to a story going around my hometown, someone decided to run drugs in their auto. Instead of going a reasonable 60 or even 55 mph[1], they went 80.
Needless to say, as soon as they hit a certain town known for its speed-zealous cops, they were pulled over. Their suspicious behavior clenched the deal, and the drugs were found.
Not only were they being stupid in committing their crime (speeding, suspicious behavior, etc), the crime itself was stupid -- drug laws in the US tend to be severe, and the profit wasn't that great, say, roughly, a few weeks of honest work. While other crimes may not be as risky, dealing drugs requires commiting an illegal act (selling drugs) to many people, most of which are likely to roll over on you if they are caught.
Many crimes have that problem -- few gains for the risks taken. With the risk/reward ratio, honest work is pretty attractive. But perhaps that is the problem with many criminals -- poor risk/reward assessment, laziness, and general stupidity.
And remember, you never hear about the criminals who did get away with it.
[1] Where I'm from, going 55 mph on a 55 mph road is not suspicious behavior. Other places may vary.
With all the griping about Debian's installer, I wonder how many times one actually installs a new distro on bare metal.
I have the same debian installation going for the past three years. Sure, I've upgraded the distribution to the latest stable release, but it didn't require a reinstallation, only an apt-get dist-upgrade.
The debian installer may not be the easiest installer around, but it works on all the platforms out there, and the main objection -- dselect -- isn't difficult if you RTFM
When I read this, I was worried that EA might be engaged in accounting fraud... however they are just exploiting people for profit. Hooray!
That's my first reaction: I'm a stockholder, you see. Now my second reaction: shit, that's not very nice... It's interesting to see how your priorities shift and you start rationalizing all sorts of evil when you have a financial interest. I mean, a good liberal like me, and I often find myself rooting for the tobacco companies and saying stuff like "well, it's their own damn fault for taking up smoking".
Have you considered the long term impact? Assuming they avoid any class-action lawsuits (a big if), they will end up driving away talented employees. Perhaps they will be able to replace those talented people, perhaps not.
The burnout will increase their employee cost, either way.
In the long run, they might drive away talented people, and suffer. I've seen it happen to companies that were unwilling to fairly compensate employees.
The reality is that these things are seldom as straightforward as they seem, and whenever someone claims that the industry is in some giant collusion to keep an innovation down (rather that the more credible scenario that they are mercilessly looking for an opportunity to devastate their competitors and capture the market) you really need to look for the tinfoil helmets, and look deeper than the surface.
You are just saying that because you are an industry mole. We all know that Detroit has a carburetor that will get 500 mpg on a gallon of tap water, but hasn't released it to the public because of the vast conspiracy with the oil companies, Saudi Arabia, and the global masonic conspiracy.
The pope believed that Galileo called him a simpleton in one of his books.
In my opinion, Galileo did not base the character of "Simplicio" on pope Urban, but it was easy to interpret Simplicio as Urban. Once the rumors started, they were believable.
Galileo attacked the geocentric theory and its holders as idiots, winning him few friends on the other side. At this time, there wasn't enough evidence (as you said) to prove that the heliocentric viewpoint was superior.
Galileo was anything but diplomatic. And he wasn't always right -- he had funny ideas about tides (caused by the earth's rotation), comets (illusions of the atmosphere), orbits (elliptical orbits were impossible, thus all orbits are circular), gravity (items on earth don't fly off into space because matter wants to stay moving in a circular motion), and a few other things. He tended to attack those who didn't believe in his theories, winning him many enemies.
We tend to create a hero out of Galileo, showing him as a torchbearer of science against the ignorance and stupidity of the church.
Yet, as a mental exercise, imagine the following:
Galileo, embracing the old ideas, thought that comets were a creation on the upper atmosphere, and attacked a Jesuit thinker (Grassi) who believed that they were heavenly bodies.
That statement would be historically accurate.
Or what about Galileo attacking Kepler's equations on orbits and Kepler's insane idea that the moon causes the tides?
Galileo, IMNSO, is overrated. His claim to fame is that most people assume that he was prosecuted by the Catholic church for discovering that the earth went around the sun. The truth of the matter is that [1] Galileo did not discover heliocentrism, [2] he was prosecuted by the Catholic church for pissing off a bunch of religious people and writing a book that could be interpreted (wrongly) as attacking the pope, [3] Galileo's idea of a heliocentric system with circular orbits/did not work/ (geocentric theory made more accurate predictions then heliocentric theory with circular orbits), and [4] there was nothing to disprove geocentrism or show that heliocentrism was superior (see also [3]).
If Galileo had decided to become a farmer, modern science wouldn't have suffered much. If Kepler had taken up farming, the astronomy would be on hold until someone else had repeated Kepler's discoveries.
Bottom line: well, surprising as it may sound, no, you're wrong. There are a great many good reasons to be vegan, or at least purely vegetarian, but the welfare of animals doesn't actually qualify.
I'm not naive enough to think that the wilds are a Disneyish paradise. Animals suffer from parasites, diseases, starvation, and not-the-most painless deaths.
However, in factory farms, animals suffer from systematic mutilation (for poultry, consider debeaking) so that they can't effectively attack each other (yes, Virginia, cannibalism (!) is a problem in caged poultry), which often leads to sinus infections (especially in turkeys). Cage sizes tend to be small, with, in 1999, the industry standard being less then half a square foot per cage for egg-laying hens. Speaking of egg-laying hens, the methods of disposal for male chicks include crushing or grinding alive for animal feed. For egg-laying hens, osteoporsis is common, due to the lack of exercise and the insane demands made for egg laying.
For meat poultry, leg problems are common, due to the weight of the bird. In addition, human slaughter rules do not apply to poultry (although many slaughterhouses do try to electrocute the birds first -- just enough to stun, not enough to kill, since that damages the meat). Birds are later killed by throat slitting -- often by a machine, which ends up missing some birds. The birds that aren't killed are scalded alive. The industry term for these birds are "redskins".
This happens to larger animals as well. On the slaughterhouse assembly lines, its not uncommon for animals to be slaughtered alive, cut apart peice by peice until they finally die.
Due to the crowded, dirty conditions of factory farms, poultry and pigs tend towards respiratory diseases.
So lets review the factory farm animal conditions:
Crowded, dusty environment
Repiratory diseases common
Bone disorders common due to lack of exercise/size
Skin conditions common due to pen sizes and materials.
Mutilations common to prevent self-injury/injury to others
Chance of a being scalded, ground up, or cut apart while still alive.
For poultry and pork, I think the lives of wild animals are much better. For beef cattle, you/may/ be right, but that would be an entirely different discussion, and one I that I would have to research more closely (for example, comparing the number of downed and improperly slaughtered cattle to the number of large wild herbovoirs that starve to death in the wild and how quickly preditors kill them).
Although this is anecdotal, I've observed many animals, both farm and wild. Descartes be damned, they do appear to be more then a collection of unthinking, unfeeling mechanisms. And while some wild animals do seem to live a rather paranoid life, they also seem to receive joy and pleasure from their existance.
You assume that since some factory farm animals don't measure high stress hormones, the animal is not in a stressful environment. However, in continued stressful environments, research has shown that creatures tend towards depression and apathy. Ne'ermind that we tend to breed animals to be apathetic in the first place.
As for the "free-range" (which another poster suggested), the regulations surrounding that are about as weak as the "organic" label, something that I'm rather pissed about. When consumers buy "organic, free range" meat, they are assuming that animals have access to sunlight and the open air, organic feed, and are willing to pay a premium for it. Most would probably be surprised to find that they are paying for animals eating regular feed with a door to a tiny pen outside.
You are right, there are plenty of other valid reasons for veganism. But animal cruelty is valid as well.
Anyone who thinks the American Indians were a universally "nice" people living in some sort of "one with nature" utopia needs to lay off the kool-aid.
They were and are humans just like everyone else and suffered from the same vices, power struggles, warfare and savagery as every other example of humanity throughout history.
Living in North Dakota, I've seen the local Dakota (Souix) Indians complain about how the US Government stole their land -- ignoring that they stole the same land from other plains Indians after fighting a long war with the Ojibwa over land and rice in the woodlands of Minnesota and losing.
Given how many times an update has broken an app or caused a conflict I cant say I would welcome an auto updating autonomous Linux system. As with any modern OS an admin must review what an update does and test it out prior to rolling it out to the unwashed masses. This is true of any and all oporating systems, be they MacOS, Linux, Windows or what have you.
While auto-updating has its risks, it is possible to backport fixes to the current version of the software in the release, as at least one linux distro does for its stable branch. Prevents a lot of breakage.
You are right, a good system admin should pretest patches first. But this is the world where there are 10 people in the local office, and no admins. I'd take the risk of a back-ported patch rather then all of the unpatched systems out there.
Of course, any good admin should be able to disable autoupdates.
We have had heavy lifting capacity to geo-syncronous orbit for 30 years. In all that time I can think of 2 things that require massive payloads. 1) Manned spaceflight. 2) Space based weapon systems.
3) Energy. Cheap, very clean energy. Generate it on orbital platforms, and use a wide beam to safely beam it down to earth to a receiver, almost long strong sunlight, and about as dangerous. The only pollution is waste heat. (Earth-based nuclear is probably more efficient, slightly more pollution, but is less viable politically.)
4) Zero-G manufacturing. Think of the uses for a sterile, clean environment. Source of vacuum very close by. Most industries will stay on earth, but a few industries will benefit from space, and new industries will be born there.
5) Resources -- you are right, it would be better to dump the materials in some Montana field. But how are we going to get up there? Space shuttle is not economical nor capable of the distances needed and rockets also have high costs. Space elevators get us out of the gravity well, and some proposals even include a trailing whip instead of a counterweight, so we could "fling" probes into space.
6) Knowledge. In the long run, pure research pays off handsomely.
Re:What's the point?
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Internet Hunting
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I thought the entire excuse for hunting was for tradition and the sportsmanship. This completely removes both. This is purely idiotic.
Is it?
In our society, animals are considered materials for our use, as we see fit, with a few rare exceptions[1].
In the US, most hunters are those who hunt for entertainment.
Free market forces seem to indicate that there is a large enough group of people who consider this entertainment enough to exchange money for the privledge. While you or I may not consider it "fun", others do.
That being the case, I ask you:
What is the difference between shooting an animal for your personal enjoyment, and having a nice tasty turkey for Thanksgiving?
Both results in the death of an animal. Both are done for personal enjoyment (thrill of the hunt/liking the taste of turkey). Both aren't necessary.
The only difference that I see is that the wild animal has a much nicer life then the caged turkey up until the moment of death.
Yet there are many more people opposed to hunting then there are to Thanksgiving.
Disclaimer: Yep, I'm a vegan. I don't hunt or eat turkey.[2]
[1] Mostly animal cruelty laws towards "cute" animals. Animal cruelty laws do not apply towards factory farming, if they did, I would be surprised if one factory farm remained open.
[2] To recap the past/. discussions I've had: Nope, I'm not going to die of some unknown vitamin deficiency. Yes, I do get enough protein. Yes, I do know that animal-derived materials are used in many common materials, such as plastic.
Young grasshopper, time for research, try Wikipedia's article on space elevators for a starting point. The external links (at the bottom) are good for advanced research.
Short answer: There is nothing, as far as we can tell, which makes a space elevator impossible. Current limiting technology appears to be the size and strength of carbon nanotubes we can create.
What most people (especially americans with their cheap power) don't realize is that those "spare" cycles aren't free at all.
They cost watts, meaning money out of your pocket and increased pollution in the long term because the extra power drain will cause more coal/oil to be burned.
Assuming that you aren't running the computer just for this project, how much is the additional cost?
Most of a computer's power is lost in places other then the CPU (drives, video card, monitor, etc).
Say the average CPU runs about 100 watts[1]. That is.1 kWh, or roughly 1 kWh over the course of a 10-hour workday. A kWh is still relatively cheap, say, 8 - 14 cents (US$). So your cost, per one hour workday, is about $.08 - $.14 for the CPU's electricity.
Even assuming that CPU HALT instructions are reducing consumption drastically (75% or so) during normal use, the cost of a program that runs the CPU at 100% would then be only $.06 to $.12 for every 10 hours.
Now, modern power plants tend to be pretty efficient, due to economics and the scale of the plant. It might not be cost-effective for you to get an extra few BTUs of heat out of your furnace, or an extra few miles out of each gallon of gas in your vehicle, since the cost may be higher then the savings in fuel. Power plants are different - an efficiency of 38% vs an efficiency of 35% results in big money rather quick. You may do more for the environment cutting down on errands with the car, and turning down your thermostat.
[1] Warning: pulling numbers out of my ass since I haven't done checking on recent CPUs, but the old bartons ran about 70W, P3's were a lot more efficient, old Athlons were power-hungry, but 100W should be a decent estimate.
Incorporating is to protect you from bullshit, it costs less then 100 dollors.
Its slightly more complicated then that -- you don't want to comingle personal and company funds, etc, or else the protection of the LLC is lost.
In addition, I've been told that a corporate formed by just one person and employing that person is more vulnerable to that person's assets being attacked. My impression of it is that a LLC is less vulnerable to personal liability, but is not immune! IANAL, but I would consult with one before blindly following the internet's advice.
If you have a good collection of personal assets, you should be paying for an umbrella policy. A mere US$ 1,000,000[1] policy is roughly US$ 150 annually. An umbrella policy (rough definition) is an insurance policy that kicks in if you have a large settlement against you. You will lose whatever the deductable is (say, US$ 10,000) if no other insurancy policy you possess covers it, but afterwords, the umbrella policy will kick in. You also gain the advantage of involving the insurance company in any lawsuits, and they will probably know where to get good lawyers. This is good advice for anyone, self-employed or not.
[1] Why US$ 1,000,000? Its a good round number.;) YMMV, but in many (most?) cases, if there is a credible lawsuit, it will try to settle for the policy limit rather then risk going to court, assuming the policy limit is adequate. Most lawsuits are settled for a small fraction of US$ 1,000,000, which makes this coverage adequate for many people. However, it is a risk, and like many risks, can not be completely removed. Do your research, perhaps you'll decide for a higher limit.
WHERE did you get that? Let's see... First satelite in orbit? Check. First dog in space? Check. First man in space? Check. First woman in space? Check. Shot down a U2 spyplane at 70,000 feet? Check. Lots of supersonic ultra-maneuvreable aircraft? Check.
Food for thought:
There is an interesting article by Robert Heinlein about his visit to the Soviet Union, which included the spy plane incident.
Heinlein was very skeptical about the Russian claims of shooting down the U-2 with a missile, noting that the Russians had recovered the plane intact.
That is probably an unfounded conspiracy theory, since we later learned that the Russians shot off a whole bunch of missiles, including one that shot down and killed one of their own pilots. According to the pilot's testimony, it appears that the U2 wasn't directly hit, but had an explosion near enough to it to damage it. [If you want to kill several hours, this is rather fascinating reading via the web and google's usenet archives -- both for the event itself, and the guesses/conspiracies what happened.]
Heinlein's account of Russia is also worth looking up, especially for the tinfoil hat crowd. He was under the impression that the USSR was purposely overstating the population of Moscow. He also considered the possibility that Russia had covered up the loss of a human pilot in a rocket accident. Look for "Worlds of Robert A Heinlien", c. 1980-ish or so, it includes the (non-fiction) article as well as other works by him, both fiction and non-fiction.
As for Russian technology, they whupped the US in several areas, including some aspects of the space program in addition to the ones you mentioned, as well as medical (e.i. laser-eye surgery), biological (biological weapons of terrifying effects, others), and military (certain planes, guns, etc, especially from a "ruggedness" perspective).
In the end, they seemed to have lost the cold war due to the US's economic might. Capital is a resource, and the US's less-managed economy[1] was better at generating capital then the USSR's more managed economy. I am of the opinion that the US also won because of its own openness. The security restrictions of the USSR was their own downfall[2]. The USSR's internal propaganda was worse then the US's, which was probably also a factor. Note which areas the USSR exceeded the US in -- those areas which was relatively cheap, yet had resources devoted to it (biological weapons, warfare), or those hard science that did not threaten communist dogma.
[1] And yes, the US's economy has been managed for many, many years now, through the gov't expansion/contraction of the money supply.
[2] Something I wish the Powers That Be would realize about the "War on Terror".
I started off changing my tire, but ended up rebuilding the air filter.
I know that's supposed to be a joke, but the geek in me is trying to figure out how to rebuild an air filter.
Its like saying "I started off upgrading my RAM, but in the end I changed the CPU in my power supply."
While it may be technically possible to take an air filter apart, and replace some components (as it is technically possible to call some part of a power suppy the central processing unit, and change that) it doesn't make sense.
Theres a feature which works remarkably well under Windows XP, much faster and seamlessly than most remote X window logins. I'm not surprised they want to call that feature by the same name. Strange considering that network transparency is supposed to be X's strongpoint.
Odd, I consider it just the reverse.
Using windows built-in tools, it appears to be impossible to share just one application window.
Almost every linux/unix install has ssh, which makes it trivial to remotely launch an application over a secure connection, and that application's window will be a native part of the desktop as far as window decoration goes[1]. Ssh also makes it rather trivial to tunnel an x application through many firewalls.
Ne'ermind that X is multiuser. RDP is limited to one. X, without any add on tools, seems a lot more capable of client/server setups, while under windows you need additional commercial software to do so.
RDP has some nice features -- bandwidth usage is a lot more efficient, while under X even the low bandwidth proxy is not as efficient. And some people find it easier to setup then X.
Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. For what I use it for, X seems to be more "polished".
That is my opinion.
Slightly OT: Reading how windows is so much better then linux in the usability department only leads to my disappointment down the road. I end up using the rare MS Windows machine, and I find a cut & paste problem, or something ends up near impossible to do, etc. I keep expecting the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I find that windows is just another OS, still flawed in its latest release.
[1] Cut & paste beyond plain text is still a problem though.
i don't get it. what's up with search being the "holy grail" of computing? kindly explain this to me. is everyone really this disorganized that everyone has to search for their own files now?
YES!
The average computer user saves their files in whichever directory the save-file prompt defaults to.
Its like an office where, as soon as you are done with a peice of paper, you drop it.
The solution is not spending 15 minutes to teaching organization (e.i. how to use directories and files) but to hire an 8 year old who spends a minutes searching for you everytime you want a file.
Agreed. Moreover, I've been hearing too many theories about how voters were forced, deceived or generally brainwashed into voting for Bush. I've heard similar gripes about 'stupid' vs. 'smart', and of course seen the standard IQ by state chart.
Guess what, kids: sometimes in a democracy, other people win. This is what most of the American voters wanted, and that's the way it works.
The following is presented for discussion only -- I don't necessarily endorse these viewpoint, but I think they are interesting.
The founding fathers did not have voting for the common man. Those only in good standing in the community (property owners) could vote[1]. There was also was the barrier that the horribly uneducated tended to be illiterate.
Now, anyone who wants to vote can vote. This may be an improvement. It may not be.
People occasionally come up with the idea of manditory voting, or a vacation day on election day. For the health of the country, are we better off forcing people to vote? Polls are open all day, and are easy to find. If the only reason you have to vote is to avoid a fine, perhaps the country is better off if you don't vote.
In the same light, imagine a ballot that has no party affiliation listed. George Washington was against political parties, he thought they'd be the death of the country. Perhaps he was right. Imagine a country where any party was unable to voice any support for a candidate[2].
Or perhaps a ballot that only has positions listed, no names. You must remember the correct spelling of your candidates' names, or at least write them down on a slip of paper beforehand. If you can't spell "John Kerry and John Edwards" or "George Bush and Dick Cheney", perhaps your vote is better off uncounted.[3]
Just food for thought.
[1] Of course, they also had sexist exclusions, as well as discounting the votes of slaves.
[2] A party could still work for a candidate, but could not publicaly state that it was aiding a candidate.
[3] I'm imagining the political ads right now: Democrats for John Kerry. That is J- O- H- N- Space- K- E- R- R- Y-. Remember, an 'h' in "John" and two 'r's in "Kerry".
Not only are people dumb, but they get used to using one browser. No matter what type of computer they are. For example, my school bought a bunch of iMacs this year. They all run OS X, and all of them have Safari. What browser to people use 90% of the time? Internet Explorer. Which browser is easier to find? Safari.
From the perspective of J. Random User, Internet Explorer works but the other browsers are broken.
When J. Random User visits some godforsaken abomination of a webpage, IE works, because people test webpages in IE. Other browsers, once they try to parse the mess of HTML and scripting languages, barf in extremely interesting ways. Therefore, they don't work.
Its frustrating...
Footnote: In the end, the spyware that comes through IE ends up affecting the stability and speed of their machines, but J. Random User knows that all computers get slower and slower over time. Computers are like cars -- you don't expect the same performances between a new engine and an engine with 200k miles on it...
dd just reads sequentially and will probably just return the same garbage each time.
My bad. The principle is sound though -- perhaps accessing the bad drive directly through perl, and grabbing the hdd testing routine from badblocks, it would be possible to do an analysis of the drive similar to the GRC's software.
dd does not investigate hardare. dd does bit copies and does not even do error correction. Spinrite -- while not a tool for deep analysis of dammaged media -- does have the ability to check for data errors and correct them.
Either I'm misunderstanding dd, or else you are misunderstanding me.
Use dd to make several copies of the disk. Imagine, for argument's sake, that the disk is 20 bits long, and, for argument's sake, we make 3 copies.
dd doesn't need to do error correction, we want it to figure out what it keeps reading. For example, dd keeps getting a different value for bits 4, 5, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19.
The perl script would then take the images dd gave us, figure out which bits are different, and then figure out the most common result is. For example, for bit #4, 1 is the most common result, so it would "probably" be correct. For bit #5, 0 is the most common result. Etc, etc.
Despite the bullshit on the Gibson Research website, [the software] essentially repeatedly reads bad data and uses some statistical analysis to determine whether each bit was more likely 1 or 0, depending on which came back most often.
You should be able to whip something up with dd to do something similar. Make n number of dd images. Write a quick perl program to read through all the images at the same time, figure out if the bit at i position is more likely to be a one or a zero, and write the more likely bit to a new image file. Then mount the new image file as a loopback device, or copy it and try to run some file checkers on the copy.
When you say "match the natural radioactivity of the seas" do you mean that if we dumped 50% of the slugs into the oceans and it all got distributed evenly it'd double the radiation of the Earth's water, or do you mean something else?
That it would double the radioactivity.
I suppose if we can trust our nuclear waste storage to not radiate the deserts/mountains/Indian reservations of our own country, then the bottom of the ocean would seem plenty safe (and it would seem to my squishy mind that the odds of 50% of the slugs being pulverized down there wouldn't be too high). Perhaps we feel safer with the waste where we know clearly where it is, and where we'd be able to detect and hopefully respond to any kind of disaster.
The slugs would, under the proposals I've seen, be some sort of pseudo-ceramic material with the waste mixed into the material in the center. They would act like a bunker-buster bomb, but without the explosion -- shaped to hit the soft mud of the sea bed and sink down, under their own momentum, burying themselves. The mud is hundreds of feet thick in spots, providing excellent shielding of its own, as well as preventing access from most lifeforms, including our own. The chance of it being recovered in 25,000 years is minimal. After 25k years, most of the very radioactive isotopes have decayed, greatly decreasing its radioactivity. However, in the long term, the mud would slowly compress into rock over the period of a few million years, and end up on the top of some mountain chain tens of millions of years later, a strange fossil of lead and some almost harmless low radioactive isotopes. Unless its close to a subduction zone in the crust. In that case, it will be but a drop of extra radioactivity in the great volume of molten, flowing rock of the mantel, and we won't have to worry about it.
And we might also be better off putting it where we know about the local plant and animal life. There's still a lot we don't know about the ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean. If those organisms could somehow eat away at the containment vessels, we could have a big problem.
Not likely. We have recoved clay pots from the seafloor that are thousands of years old. Under this proposal, we would be burying them under a few hundred feet of mud, in an inedible packaging.
A seafloor mud disposal is desireable because it prevents another civilization digging up the materials in a few thousand years. (Sure, we'll leave them with thousands of landfills, all filled with interesting materials of varying toxicity, and sooner or later, many of them will leak toxins into the water supply, but we are paranoid about letting them die slowly of radioactivity. Dying slowly of heavy-metal toxins is okay though.) The downside of a seafloor mud disposal is political -- we have treaties against dropping nuclear waste on the seafloor, as well as the wacko extremist environmentalists, and a public that fears anything nuclear or radioactive.
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Depends. If you are working as IT technician in a company, you might find yourself installing something on a box reasonably frequently. On the other hand you would be installing it "for a reason" so you probably will end up with SuSE/Redhat for Oracle or (insert commercial product here). Same for desktops.
For debian servers in an IT environment, my impression is that most people skip dselect and install what they want through apt-get. Its trivial to make a quick list of packages you want on every server and run it through apt-get, then customize packages for the server's functions (web server gets apache, file server gets NFS, etc...)
You know, I've been thinking about this for a while. Greed isn't what gets you in the end. It's stupidity.
According to a story going around my hometown, someone decided to run drugs in their auto. Instead of going a reasonable 60 or even 55 mph[1], they went 80.
Needless to say, as soon as they hit a certain town known for its speed-zealous cops, they were pulled over. Their suspicious behavior clenched the deal, and the drugs were found.
Not only were they being stupid in committing their crime (speeding, suspicious behavior, etc), the crime itself was stupid -- drug laws in the US tend to be severe, and the profit wasn't that great, say, roughly, a few weeks of honest work. While other crimes may not be as risky, dealing drugs requires commiting an illegal act (selling drugs) to many people, most of which are likely to roll over on you if they are caught.
Many crimes have that problem -- few gains for the risks taken. With the risk/reward ratio, honest work is pretty attractive. But perhaps that is the problem with many criminals -- poor risk/reward assessment, laziness, and general stupidity.
And remember, you never hear about the criminals who did get away with it.
[1] Where I'm from, going 55 mph on a 55 mph road is not suspicious behavior. Other places may vary.
With all the griping about Debian's installer, I wonder how many times one actually installs a new distro on bare metal.
I have the same debian installation going for the past three years. Sure, I've upgraded the distribution to the latest stable release, but it didn't require a reinstallation, only an apt-get dist-upgrade.
The debian installer may not be the easiest installer around, but it works on all the platforms out there, and the main objection -- dselect -- isn't difficult if you RTFM
When I read this, I was worried that EA might be engaged in accounting fraud... however they are just exploiting people for profit. Hooray!
That's my first reaction: I'm a stockholder, you see. Now my second reaction: shit, that's not very nice... It's interesting to see how your priorities shift and you start rationalizing all sorts of evil when you have a financial interest. I mean, a good liberal like me, and I often find myself rooting for the tobacco companies and saying stuff like "well, it's their own damn fault for taking up smoking".
Have you considered the long term impact? Assuming they avoid any class-action lawsuits (a big if), they will end up driving away talented employees. Perhaps they will be able to replace those talented people, perhaps not.
The burnout will increase their employee cost, either way.
In the long run, they might drive away talented people, and suffer. I've seen it happen to companies that were unwilling to fairly compensate employees.
The reality is that these things are seldom as straightforward as they seem, and whenever someone claims that the industry is in some giant collusion to keep an innovation down (rather that the more credible scenario that they are mercilessly looking for an opportunity to devastate their competitors and capture the market) you really need to look for the tinfoil helmets, and look deeper than the surface.
You are just saying that because you are an industry mole. We all know that Detroit has a carburetor that will get 500 mpg on a gallon of tap water, but hasn't released it to the public because of the vast conspiracy with the oil companies, Saudi Arabia, and the global masonic conspiracy.
Good post, but you missed one important point:
The pope believed that Galileo called him a simpleton in one of his books.
In my opinion, Galileo did not base the character of "Simplicio" on pope Urban, but it was easy to interpret Simplicio as Urban. Once the rumors started, they were believable.
Galileo attacked the geocentric theory and its holders as idiots, winning him few friends on the other side. At this time, there wasn't enough evidence (as you said) to prove that the heliocentric viewpoint was superior.
Galileo was anything but diplomatic. And he wasn't always right -- he had funny ideas about tides (caused by the earth's rotation), comets (illusions of the atmosphere), orbits (elliptical orbits were impossible, thus all orbits are circular), gravity (items on earth don't fly off into space because matter wants to stay moving in a circular motion), and a few other things. He tended to attack those who didn't believe in his theories, winning him many enemies.
We tend to create a hero out of Galileo, showing him as a torchbearer of science against the ignorance and stupidity of the church.
Yet, as a mental exercise, imagine the following:
Galileo, embracing the old ideas, thought that comets were a creation on the upper atmosphere, and attacked a Jesuit thinker (Grassi) who believed that they were heavenly bodies.
That statement would be historically accurate.
Or what about Galileo attacking Kepler's equations on orbits and Kepler's insane idea that the moon causes the tides?
Galileo, IMNSO, is overrated. His claim to fame is that most people assume that he was prosecuted by the Catholic church for discovering that the earth went around the sun. The truth of the matter is that [1] Galileo did not discover heliocentrism, [2] he was prosecuted by the Catholic church for pissing off a bunch of religious people and writing a book that could be interpreted (wrongly) as attacking the pope, [3] Galileo's idea of a heliocentric system with circular orbits /did not work/ (geocentric theory made more accurate predictions then heliocentric theory with circular orbits), and [4] there was nothing to disprove geocentrism or show that heliocentrism was superior (see also [3]).
If Galileo had decided to become a farmer, modern science wouldn't have suffered much. If Kepler had taken up farming, the astronomy would be on hold until someone else had repeated Kepler's discoveries.
Bottom line: well, surprising as it may sound, no, you're wrong. There are a great many good reasons to be vegan, or at least purely vegetarian, but the welfare of animals doesn't actually qualify.
I'm not naive enough to think that the wilds are a Disneyish paradise. Animals suffer from parasites, diseases, starvation, and not-the-most painless deaths.
However, in factory farms, animals suffer from systematic mutilation (for poultry, consider debeaking) so that they can't effectively attack each other (yes, Virginia, cannibalism (!) is a problem in caged poultry), which often leads to sinus infections (especially in turkeys). Cage sizes tend to be small, with, in 1999, the industry standard being less then half a square foot per cage for egg-laying hens. Speaking of egg-laying hens, the methods of disposal for male chicks include crushing or grinding alive for animal feed. For egg-laying hens, osteoporsis is common, due to the lack of exercise and the insane demands made for egg laying.
For meat poultry, leg problems are common, due to the weight of the bird. In addition, human slaughter rules do not apply to poultry (although many slaughterhouses do try to electrocute the birds first -- just enough to stun, not enough to kill, since that damages the meat). Birds are later killed by throat slitting -- often by a machine, which ends up missing some birds. The birds that aren't killed are scalded alive. The industry term for these birds are "redskins".
This happens to larger animals as well. On the slaughterhouse assembly lines, its not uncommon for animals to be slaughtered alive, cut apart peice by peice until they finally die.
Due to the crowded, dirty conditions of factory farms, poultry and pigs tend towards respiratory diseases.
So lets review the factory farm animal conditions:
For poultry and pork, I think the lives of wild animals are much better. For beef cattle, you /may/ be right, but that would be an entirely different discussion, and one I that I would have to research more closely (for example, comparing the number of downed and improperly slaughtered cattle to the number of large wild herbovoirs that starve to death in the wild and how quickly preditors kill them).
Although this is anecdotal, I've observed many animals, both farm and wild. Descartes be damned, they do appear to be more then a collection of unthinking, unfeeling mechanisms. And while some wild animals do seem to live a rather paranoid life, they also seem to receive joy and pleasure from their existance.
You assume that since some factory farm animals don't measure high stress hormones, the animal is not in a stressful environment. However, in continued stressful environments, research has shown that creatures tend towards depression and apathy. Ne'ermind that we tend to breed animals to be apathetic in the first place.
As for the "free-range" (which another poster suggested), the regulations surrounding that are about as weak as the "organic" label, something that I'm rather pissed about. When consumers buy "organic, free range" meat, they are assuming that animals have access to sunlight and the open air, organic feed, and are willing to pay a premium for it. Most would probably be surprised to find that they are paying for animals eating regular feed with a door to a tiny pen outside.
You are right, there are plenty of other valid reasons for veganism. But animal cruelty is valid as well.
Anyone who thinks the American Indians were a universally "nice" people living in some sort of "one with nature" utopia needs to lay off the kool-aid.
They were and are humans just like everyone else and suffered from the same vices, power struggles, warfare and savagery as every other example of humanity throughout history.
Living in North Dakota, I've seen the local Dakota (Souix) Indians complain about how the US Government stole their land -- ignoring that they stole the same land from other plains Indians after fighting a long war with the Ojibwa over land and rice in the woodlands of Minnesota and losing.
Given how many times an update has broken an app or caused a conflict I cant say I would welcome an auto updating autonomous Linux system. As with any modern OS an admin must review what an update does and test it out prior to rolling it out to the unwashed masses. This is true of any and all oporating systems, be they MacOS, Linux, Windows or what have you.
While auto-updating has its risks, it is possible to backport fixes to the current version of the software in the release, as at least one linux distro does for its stable branch. Prevents a lot of breakage.
You are right, a good system admin should pretest patches first. But this is the world where there are 10 people in the local office, and no admins. I'd take the risk of a back-ported patch rather then all of the unpatched systems out there.
Of course, any good admin should be able to disable autoupdates.
We have had heavy lifting capacity to geo-syncronous orbit for 30 years. In all that time I can think of 2 things that require massive payloads. 1) Manned spaceflight. 2) Space based weapon systems.
3) Energy. Cheap, very clean energy. Generate it on orbital platforms, and use a wide beam to safely beam it down to earth to a receiver, almost long strong sunlight, and about as dangerous. The only pollution is waste heat. (Earth-based nuclear is probably more efficient, slightly more pollution, but is less viable politically.)
4) Zero-G manufacturing. Think of the uses for a sterile, clean environment. Source of vacuum very close by. Most industries will stay on earth, but a few industries will benefit from space, and new industries will be born there.
5) Resources -- you are right, it would be better to dump the materials in some Montana field. But how are we going to get up there? Space shuttle is not economical nor capable of the distances needed and rockets also have high costs. Space elevators get us out of the gravity well, and some proposals even include a trailing whip instead of a counterweight, so we could "fling" probes into space.
6) Knowledge. In the long run, pure research pays off handsomely.
I thought the entire excuse for hunting was for tradition and the sportsmanship. This completely removes both. This is purely idiotic.
Is it?
In our society, animals are considered materials for our use, as we see fit, with a few rare exceptions[1].
In the US, most hunters are those who hunt for entertainment.
Free market forces seem to indicate that there is a large enough group of people who consider this entertainment enough to exchange money for the privledge. While you or I may not consider it "fun", others do.
That being the case, I ask you:
What is the difference between shooting an animal for your personal enjoyment, and having a nice tasty turkey for Thanksgiving?
Both results in the death of an animal. Both are done for personal enjoyment (thrill of the hunt/liking the taste of turkey). Both aren't necessary.
The only difference that I see is that the wild animal has a much nicer life then the caged turkey up until the moment of death.
Yet there are many more people opposed to hunting then there are to Thanksgiving.
Disclaimer: Yep, I'm a vegan. I don't hunt or eat turkey.[2]
[1] Mostly animal cruelty laws towards "cute" animals. Animal cruelty laws do not apply towards factory farming, if they did, I would be surprised if one factory farm remained open. /. discussions I've had: Nope, I'm not going to die of some unknown vitamin deficiency. Yes, I do get enough protein. Yes, I do know that animal-derived materials are used in many common materials, such as plastic.
[2] To recap the past
[ Snip ignorance about a space elevator... ]
Young grasshopper, time for research, try Wikipedia's article on space elevators for a starting point. The external links (at the bottom) are good for advanced research.
Short answer: There is nothing, as far as we can tell, which makes a space elevator impossible. Current limiting technology appears to be the size and strength of carbon nanotubes we can create.
What most people (especially americans with their cheap power) don't realize is that those "spare" cycles aren't free at all.
They cost watts, meaning money out of your pocket and increased pollution in the long term because the extra power drain will cause more coal/oil to be burned.
Assuming that you aren't running the computer just for this project, how much is the additional cost?
Most of a computer's power is lost in places other then the CPU (drives, video card, monitor, etc).
Say the average CPU runs about 100 watts[1]. That is .1 kWh, or roughly 1 kWh over the course of a 10-hour workday. A kWh is still relatively cheap, say, 8 - 14 cents (US$). So your cost, per one hour workday, is about $.08 - $.14 for the CPU's electricity.
Even assuming that CPU HALT instructions are reducing consumption drastically (75% or so) during normal use, the cost of a program that runs the CPU at 100% would then be only $.06 to $.12 for every 10 hours.
Now, modern power plants tend to be pretty efficient, due to economics and the scale of the plant. It might not be cost-effective for you to get an extra few BTUs of heat out of your furnace, or an extra few miles out of each gallon of gas in your vehicle, since the cost may be higher then the savings in fuel. Power plants are different - an efficiency of 38% vs an efficiency of 35% results in big money rather quick. You may do more for the environment cutting down on errands with the car, and turning down your thermostat.
[1] Warning: pulling numbers out of my ass since I haven't done checking on recent CPUs, but the old bartons ran about 70W, P3's were a lot more efficient, old Athlons were power-hungry, but 100W should be a decent estimate.
step one Incorporate.
step two pay yourself a salary
step three you are safe.
Incorporating is to protect you from bullshit, it costs less then 100 dollors.
Its slightly more complicated then that -- you don't want to comingle personal and company funds, etc, or else the protection of the LLC is lost.
In addition, I've been told that a corporate formed by just one person and employing that person is more vulnerable to that person's assets being attacked. My impression of it is that a LLC is less vulnerable to personal liability, but is not immune! IANAL, but I would consult with one before blindly following the internet's advice.
If you have a good collection of personal assets, you should be paying for an umbrella policy. A mere US$ 1,000,000[1] policy is roughly US$ 150 annually. An umbrella policy (rough definition) is an insurance policy that kicks in if you have a large settlement against you. You will lose whatever the deductable is (say, US$ 10,000) if no other insurancy policy you possess covers it, but afterwords, the umbrella policy will kick in. You also gain the advantage of involving the insurance company in any lawsuits, and they will probably know where to get good lawyers. This is good advice for anyone, self-employed or not.
[1] Why US$ 1,000,000? Its a good round number. ;) YMMV, but in many (most?) cases, if there is a credible lawsuit, it will try to settle for the policy limit rather then risk going to court, assuming the policy limit is adequate. Most lawsuits are settled for a small fraction of US$ 1,000,000, which makes this coverage adequate for many people. However, it is a risk, and like many risks, can not be completely removed. Do your research, perhaps you'll decide for a higher limit.
Gartner is just a stooge of Microsoft! Of course they are going to predict losses on the desktop for linux.
Oh, wait, you say they are predicting *gains*?
In that case, of course they are right!
WHERE did you get that? Let's see... First satelite in orbit? Check. First dog in space? Check. First man in space? Check. First woman in space? Check. Shot down a U2 spyplane at 70,000 feet? Check. Lots of supersonic ultra-maneuvreable aircraft? Check.
Food for thought:
There is an interesting article by Robert Heinlein about his visit to the Soviet Union, which included the spy plane incident.
Heinlein was very skeptical about the Russian claims of shooting down the U-2 with a missile, noting that the Russians had recovered the plane intact.
That is probably an unfounded conspiracy theory, since we later learned that the Russians shot off a whole bunch of missiles, including one that shot down and killed one of their own pilots. According to the pilot's testimony, it appears that the U2 wasn't directly hit, but had an explosion near enough to it to damage it. [If you want to kill several hours, this is rather fascinating reading via the web and google's usenet archives -- both for the event itself, and the guesses/conspiracies what happened.]
Heinlein's account of Russia is also worth looking up, especially for the tinfoil hat crowd. He was under the impression that the USSR was purposely overstating the population of Moscow. He also considered the possibility that Russia had covered up the loss of a human pilot in a rocket accident. Look for "Worlds of Robert A Heinlien", c. 1980-ish or so, it includes the (non-fiction) article as well as other works by him, both fiction and non-fiction.
As for Russian technology, they whupped the US in several areas, including some aspects of the space program in addition to the ones you mentioned, as well as medical (e.i. laser-eye surgery), biological (biological weapons of terrifying effects, others), and military (certain planes, guns, etc, especially from a "ruggedness" perspective).
In the end, they seemed to have lost the cold war due to the US's economic might. Capital is a resource, and the US's less-managed economy[1] was better at generating capital then the USSR's more managed economy. I am of the opinion that the US also won because of its own openness. The security restrictions of the USSR was their own downfall[2]. The USSR's internal propaganda was worse then the US's, which was probably also a factor. Note which areas the USSR exceeded the US in -- those areas which was relatively cheap, yet had resources devoted to it (biological weapons, warfare), or those hard science that did not threaten communist dogma.
[1] And yes, the US's economy has been managed for many, many years now, through the gov't expansion/contraction of the money supply.
[2] Something I wish the Powers That Be would realize about the "War on Terror".
I started off changing my tire, but ended up rebuilding the air filter.
I know that's supposed to be a joke, but the geek in me is trying to figure out how to rebuild an air filter.
Its like saying "I started off upgrading my RAM, but in the end I changed the CPU in my power supply."
While it may be technically possible to take an air filter apart, and replace some components (as it is technically possible to call some part of a power suppy the central processing unit, and change that) it doesn't make sense.
Theres a feature which works remarkably well under Windows XP, much faster and seamlessly than most remote X window logins. I'm not surprised they want to call that feature by the same name. Strange considering that network transparency is supposed to be X's strongpoint.
Odd, I consider it just the reverse.
Using windows built-in tools, it appears to be impossible to share just one application window.
Almost every linux/unix install has ssh, which makes it trivial to remotely launch an application over a secure connection, and that application's window will be a native part of the desktop as far as window decoration goes[1]. Ssh also makes it rather trivial to tunnel an x application through many firewalls.
Ne'ermind that X is multiuser. RDP is limited to one. X, without any add on tools, seems a lot more capable of client/server setups, while under windows you need additional commercial software to do so.
RDP has some nice features -- bandwidth usage is a lot more efficient, while under X even the low bandwidth proxy is not as efficient. And some people find it easier to setup then X.
Both systems have their advantages and disadvantages. For what I use it for, X seems to be more "polished".
That is my opinion.
Slightly OT: Reading how windows is so much better then linux in the usability department only leads to my disappointment down the road. I end up using the rare MS Windows machine, and I find a cut & paste problem, or something ends up near impossible to do, etc. I keep expecting the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I find that windows is just another OS, still flawed in its latest release.
[1] Cut & paste beyond plain text is still a problem though.
i don't get it. what's up with search being the "holy grail" of computing? kindly explain this to me. is everyone really this disorganized that everyone has to search for their own files now?
YES!
The average computer user saves their files in whichever directory the save-file prompt defaults to.
Its like an office where, as soon as you are done with a peice of paper, you drop it.
The solution is not spending 15 minutes to teaching organization (e.i. how to use directories and files) but to hire an 8 year old who spends a minutes searching for you everytime you want a file.
Agreed. Moreover, I've been hearing too many theories about how voters were forced, deceived or generally brainwashed into voting for Bush. I've heard similar gripes about 'stupid' vs. 'smart', and of course seen the standard IQ by state chart.
Guess what, kids: sometimes in a democracy, other people win. This is what most of the American voters wanted, and that's the way it works.
The following is presented for discussion only -- I don't necessarily endorse these viewpoint, but I think they are interesting.
The founding fathers did not have voting for the common man. Those only in good standing in the community (property owners) could vote[1]. There was also was the barrier that the horribly uneducated tended to be illiterate.
Now, anyone who wants to vote can vote. This may be an improvement. It may not be.
People occasionally come up with the idea of manditory voting, or a vacation day on election day. For the health of the country, are we better off forcing people to vote? Polls are open all day, and are easy to find. If the only reason you have to vote is to avoid a fine, perhaps the country is better off if you don't vote.
In the same light, imagine a ballot that has no party affiliation listed. George Washington was against political parties, he thought they'd be the death of the country. Perhaps he was right. Imagine a country where any party was unable to voice any support for a candidate[2].
Or perhaps a ballot that only has positions listed, no names. You must remember the correct spelling of your candidates' names, or at least write them down on a slip of paper beforehand. If you can't spell "John Kerry and John Edwards" or "George Bush and Dick Cheney", perhaps your vote is better off uncounted.[3]
Just food for thought.
[1] Of course, they also had sexist exclusions, as well as discounting the votes of slaves.
[2] A party could still work for a candidate, but could not publicaly state that it was aiding a candidate.
[3] I'm imagining the political ads right now: Democrats for John Kerry. That is J- O- H- N- Space- K- E- R- R- Y-. Remember, an 'h' in "John" and two 'r's in "Kerry".
Not only are people dumb, but they get used to using one browser. No matter what type of computer they are. For example, my school bought a bunch of iMacs this year. They all run OS X, and all of them have Safari. What browser to people use 90% of the time? Internet Explorer. Which browser is easier to find? Safari.
From the perspective of J. Random User, Internet Explorer works but the other browsers are broken.
When J. Random User visits some godforsaken abomination of a webpage, IE works, because people test webpages in IE. Other browsers, once they try to parse the mess of HTML and scripting languages, barf in extremely interesting ways. Therefore, they don't work.
Its frustrating...
Footnote: In the end, the spyware that comes through IE ends up affecting the stability and speed of their machines, but J. Random User knows that all computers get slower and slower over time. Computers are like cars -- you don't expect the same performances between a new engine and an engine with 200k miles on it...
dd just reads sequentially and will probably just return the same garbage each time.
My bad. The principle is sound though -- perhaps accessing the bad drive directly through perl, and grabbing the hdd testing routine from badblocks, it would be possible to do an analysis of the drive similar to the GRC's software.
dd does not investigate hardare. dd does bit copies and does not even do error correction. Spinrite -- while not a tool for deep analysis of dammaged media -- does have the ability to check for data errors and correct them.
Either I'm misunderstanding dd, or else you are misunderstanding me.
Use dd to make several copies of the disk. Imagine, for argument's sake, that the disk is 20 bits long, and, for argument's sake, we make 3 copies.
The copies then look like this:
dd doesn't need to do error correction, we want it to figure out what it keeps reading. For example, dd keeps getting a different value for bits 4, 5, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19.
The perl script would then take the images dd gave us, figure out which bits are different, and then figure out the most common result is. For example, for bit #4, 1 is the most common result, so it would "probably" be correct. For bit #5, 0 is the most common result. Etc, etc.
Despite the bullshit on the Gibson Research website, [the software] essentially repeatedly reads bad data and uses some statistical analysis to determine whether each bit was more likely 1 or 0, depending on which came back most often.
You should be able to whip something up with dd to do something similar. Make n number of dd images. Write a quick perl program to read through all the images at the same time, figure out if the bit at i position is more likely to be a one or a zero, and write the more likely bit to a new image file. Then mount the new image file as a loopback device, or copy it and try to run some file checkers on the copy.
When you say "match the natural radioactivity of the seas" do you mean that if we dumped 50% of the slugs into the oceans and it all got distributed evenly it'd double the radiation of the Earth's water, or do you mean something else?
That it would double the radioactivity.
I suppose if we can trust our nuclear waste storage to not radiate the deserts/mountains/Indian reservations of our own country, then the bottom of the ocean would seem plenty safe (and it would seem to my squishy mind that the odds of 50% of the slugs being pulverized down there wouldn't be too high). Perhaps we feel safer with the waste where we know clearly where it is, and where we'd be able to detect and hopefully respond to any kind of disaster.
The slugs would, under the proposals I've seen, be some sort of pseudo-ceramic material with the waste mixed into the material in the center. They would act like a bunker-buster bomb, but without the explosion -- shaped to hit the soft mud of the sea bed and sink down, under their own momentum, burying themselves. The mud is hundreds of feet thick in spots, providing excellent shielding of its own, as well as preventing access from most lifeforms, including our own. The chance of it being recovered in 25,000 years is minimal. After 25k years, most of the very radioactive isotopes have decayed, greatly decreasing its radioactivity. However, in the long term, the mud would slowly compress into rock over the period of a few million years, and end up on the top of some mountain chain tens of millions of years later, a strange fossil of lead and some almost harmless low radioactive isotopes. Unless its close to a subduction zone in the crust. In that case, it will be but a drop of extra radioactivity in the great volume of molten, flowing rock of the mantel, and we won't have to worry about it.
And we might also be better off putting it where we know about the local plant and animal life. There's still a lot we don't know about the ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean. If those organisms could somehow eat away at the containment vessels, we could have a big problem.
Not likely. We have recoved clay pots from the seafloor that are thousands of years old. Under this proposal, we would be burying them under a few hundred feet of mud, in an inedible packaging.
A seafloor mud disposal is desireable because it prevents another civilization digging up the materials in a few thousand years. (Sure, we'll leave them with thousands of landfills, all filled with interesting materials of varying toxicity, and sooner or later, many of them will leak toxins into the water supply, but we are paranoid about letting them die slowly of radioactivity. Dying slowly of heavy-metal toxins is okay though.) The downside of a seafloor mud disposal is political -- we have treaties against dropping nuclear waste on the seafloor, as well as the wacko extremist environmentalists, and a public that fears anything nuclear or radioactive.