It used to be the running joke that any scientific research would claim to possibly be leading to a cure for cancer. Now I guess the new paradigm is that it can be fixing the New Orleans problem instead.
If only they had KEPT pirating Bill's software he might have gone on to something else, leaving the field to people who give a shit about something OTHER than making money off of it. Just think, we might have CP/M, which was developing in a relatively open direction before Microsoft ripped it off and closed their source so that you couldn't do anything useful without reverse engineering it, and then re-engineering it at every DOS revision. And when computers got powerful enough Linus or someone like him might still have decided to write something like Linux. Only there wouldn't be anything like Windows sucking all the oxygen out of the room. DAMN YOU ALTAIR USERS!!!!!
(localroger quietly hides his paid-for copy of Microsoft 8080 Basic from those days)
...but you are just plain wrong about the safety issue. Not because there is a problem with small cars; if you were the only driver on the road and the only hazard to your health was your own skill, you'd be right, the Civic would be much safer than an Expedition. But you also must worry about the skill level of the other driver with an Expedition. If you are in an Expedition too and he T-bones you because he locked up the brakes, you will probably walk away although you'll probably be in the market for another car. If you are in the Civic, you will probably die. It really doesn't matter how many air bags you have if you're in a 2000 lb vehicle and you're hit by a 5000 lb vehicle.
There are a lot of those tanks out on the road being driven by idiots who tailgate, speed, and take corners too fast. And that's not even to mention big trucks.
Why do we still drive cars that use an internal combustion engine and only get 30 miles per gallon?
Because cars have to conform to safety and performance standards that preclude making them too underpowered or too light. The compact cars we have now (which regularly do get 40-50 MPG) already fare badly in a collision with a pickup truck, much less a tractor trailer. When all cars are as solid as motorcycles, all cars will be as dangerous as motorcycles. When a car that is only as solid as a motorcycle also can't accelerate or keep up with the other traffic, it makes a motorcycle seem like a Cadillac by comparison. Or would you try the experiment of driving one of the participants in the Solar Challenge on an unrestricted road alongside normal vehicles?
Disk and RAM storage are both called "memory" because in information theory terms they are different meatspace arrangements for doing exactly the same thing -- storing bits of information so that you can read them back. Early computer scientists didn't make much of a distinction because for one reason those early machines often used magnetic disk or drum storage the way we now use RAM. And early personal computers had no fixed disk storage, only floppy disks (if they even had those) which nobody would confuse with memory installed in the machine. So the terminology problem that was created before 1950 really didn't become a problem for average users until around 1990.
Just avoid the problem entirely
on
Rounding Algorithms
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Use integer math. After all, the computer itself does...
The ocean has a lot of square meters. At any given time at least half of it is exposed to direct sunlight. We could power our entire civilization at 1% efficiency and not make a dent in its heat distribution.
(Note that the situation is a little different with the atmosphere, because the atmosphere has much less mass than the ocean and we've been mucking with a very sensitive feedback mechanism.)
The amount of energy in the ocean is huge. Really huge. Hurricanes are a really small expression of that, and hurricanes make thermonuclear weapons look like kiddie toys.
Multiply a kilowatt or so per square meter insolation by the size of the ocean, take seven percent of that, and get back to me on whether you think it's enough.
Although I have issues with Card, I have to admit that if "not being an asshole" was a prerequisite for publication we would certainly lose some of our greatest literature.
W/R/T the current topic, I think some of the other comments have nailed why this book will never be made into a movie while Card is alive. I can't see anyone in Hollywood filming a depiction of a six year old brutally murdering a classmate, which is a central image in Ender's Game; if you snip that or soften it or make Ender too old, the story loses most of its punch.
Although I wrote the "asshat" article at kuro5hin, I wouldn't really consider it germane to this debate; and if it was, I would have just posted a link, not the entire article.
I would lay odds of 1:2 that the fuckhead doesn't live anywhere near Florida. It's possible, but exceedingly unlikely. And in any case, even if he does, last time I looked central Florida was above sea level and it was possible to drive away from there without crossing five miles of bridges, so it's not as comparable as he thinks.
Also, the "LIARLIARLIAR" schtick suggests that the chances that he's over the age of 14 are also below 30%.
Look, I'm not saying things couldn't have been done better. What sickens me is the spectacle of people who pulled off a miracle being ragged on because they didn't pull off four more.
I may not be an expert in DP/DR planning, but I happen to live here and I have seen the process. I have watched things improve a little every time the city tries this. It is fucking annoying to watch a bunch of nerds sit in their mother's basements and pronounce how they would have handled the situation so much better and what a bunch of morons a bunch of people they never heard of before are.
We actually succeeded in getting more than a million people out of the city -- about 90% of the population -- in less than 48 hours. The people who are ragging on Nagin and Blanco for what they didn't do should actually be on their fucking knees thanking them for their efforts. This required coordination between more than 10 parishes and counties and two state governments.
I have been in these traffic jams. I have stayed at times because I weighed the traffic jam potential against the hurricane. I have watched them get better at it every time they try. What in the name of Bob makes you think they haven't been looking and learning?
For Katrina nearly every existing plan at the local level actually went smoothely, many for the first time ever. To complain that such-and-such other plan wasn't in place is stupid and rude. Maybe a few more cycles down the road there would have been bus evacuations. There was no infrastructure for that this time nor was there any sane reason for such infrastructure to have been introduced. It's very easy to show pictures of the flooded buses and yell "Nyahh nyaah" but there are damn good reasons those buses stayed where they were. A lot of this bullshit is propaganda that was deliberately constructed to deflect blame from FEMA, which did not content itself with merely not showing up in time to save hundreds of lives but actively thwarted the efforts of people and agencies that did show up. Do not talk to me about what Nagin and Blanco didn't do when FEMA was turning away rescuers and aid and ordering doctors not to work on dying people because their papers weren't in order.
So basically you just made the argument that there was no good local or state disaster preparedness plan implemented?
No, I made the argument that they have been trying to do the impossible for more than a decade and finally managed to pull it off in the nick of time. Since this is not an episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide, we are impressed when someone manages to do even one impossible thing and we are assholes if we bitch that they did not manage to do five more.
And as I told the other guy, if you think you can do better come to NOLA and run for mayor. Thanks to the national-level propaganda blitz Nagin probably won't be re-elected, and you can show us how smart you are by comparison.
I am going to ignore everything you said except one thing, which illustrates why everything else you say should be ignored.
The feds said "get out of there" DAYS before it hit. Your own mayor didn't concur until it was too late.
This is absolutely untrue. I remember it QUITE well because I was in Detroit, MI on Friday evening, and went to bed thinking (along with the locals, the feds, the NOAA, and the rest of the country) that Katrina would be a cat 1 to cat 2 event for northern Florida. When I woke up Saturday morning I found out at the airport that it was going to be a cat 5 headed right up my arse.
About 36 hours later -- mid-day Sunday -- if you weren't out of town, it was too late. All previous evacuation planning had assumed a 72 hour window of opportunity, and we barely got 48 this time (and that realistically starting in the middle of the night). NOBODY was advising evacuation before Saturday morning, unless you count the "gee why does anybody live there at all" crowd. The fact that we managed to get everyone who had the means out in that time frame is a miracle. Nobody, including the people in charge, really expected it to work that well. It didn't work that well for Dennis a mere three weeks before. It had never worked that well in the 10 years or so that contraflow plans have been on the drawing board.
So where do you get this bullshit idea that "the Feds told us to get out days before?" Maybe from the same bullshit source that said those school buses were "intended for evacuation?" Here's a clue: Those school buses were "intended" to carry kids to school. Nobody in their right mind would have loaded them up with people when their most likely fate based on all of our experience would be to get caught out on a gridlocked overwater crossing when the hurricane arrived.
However vulnerable they are, buildings are safer than vehicles on the road in a hurricane. We live here. We know that.
Had Katrina spared us as so many other threats did, we might have gotten around to forming bus plans in the future. It's not as simple as it sounds. You have to have places to drive the buses to, and you have to have a plan for getting them back if the hurricane doesn't hit. And you have to expect the evacuation to succeed, which it never had in the past. We got that right just in time. It's easy for back-seat drivers who have never seen NOLA to snipe about what we coulda shoulda done, but out here on the porch it ain't that simple when you ain't got the 20/20 hindsight and you don't know what the fucking storm is actually going to do.
I will repeat this: I live here. I flew home only to evacuate 24 hours later myself. I have watched local officials prepare for this kind of event for my entire life. Kindly refrain from telling me how things are in my home when you obviously have no clue what you are talking about, kthx.
Public transportation should have been immediately used as a means of getting people out. There was also shipping lanes and carge barges that could have been used to float people out.
That's right, there's a cat 5 hurricane less than 48 hours away, and you want people to get on boats. That's almost as brilliant as the idiots who said anybody who stayed should have walked out. As for the public transportation, see my reply above -- this was the first time ever that the evacuation actually worked. Who in their right mind would get on a bus that experience says will almost certainly be caught in gridlocked traffic anyway?
Had Katrina spared the city, I have no doubt that some of the non-insane plans (buses, definitely; boats? puh-leez) would have been added to the agenda. It's not just a matter of saying "Hey, we got buses, roll 'em!" You need drivers, you need destinations, you need (most difficult of all) a plan to get the buses back if the hurricane doesn't hit. It's easy to sit in New York or San Francisco or wherever and tell us what should have been done, but the bottom line is you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.
...so I wouldn't accept your apology. In any case this was the first evacuation that went right, which was the end result of ten years of false starts and missteps. As recently as three weeks before Katrina, the attempted evacuation for Dennis was a goat rodeo. It's no easy thing to fully (or even mostly) evacuate a city of 1.3 million people that has only four major access routes, all of which cross water.
Of course, since people like you who don't live here and aren't aware of any of this know so much better than we do how to handle the situation, how's about next time there's a cat 5 hurricane barreling our way you shag your own fat ass down to NOLA and show us how it's done, 'k?
here. Google turns up many more ("katrina"+"flotilla"+"turned back"). A lot of the reporting is partisan, but can you blame them? There is little doubt that it happened.
The school buses weren't used because the evacuation had never gone right before. What good are school buses that are locked in a traffic jam?
If Katrina had spared us that probably would have been the next thing on the agenda. Of course there's a lot more to it than cranking up the buses and driving them toward Houston; you have to have destinations lined up, and because you have to also plan for the hurricane NOT to hit you also have to have a plan for getting the buses back. Of course it's easy to forget little details like that if you're back-seat driving and ragging on the locals to deflect attention from the high-level failures.
I won't comment on the rest of your partisan rant, but I do have to mention this:
Sorry, but I did not know that "the administration" was elected as governor of the state of Louisianna and the mayor of New Orleans. Oh wait, no... they weren't. It seems odd how they "mismanaged" this relief effort but did just fine and dandy during the most recent Wilma that hit Florida.
Sorry bub, but I happen to live in New Orleans. The governor and mayor did everything possible with the resources at their disposal, including the first ever truly successful contraflow evacuation of such a large American city. Afterward, with their resources scattered and the city under water, they begged the federal government for help. While the storm was still raging governor Blanco was on the phone with FEMA telling them what we would need -- helicopters, water, food, and tents, in more or less that order. Contrary to what you may have read in some quarters all of the paperwork was filled out properly and submitted ahead of time. The state of emergency was declared.
The Katrina disaster was much too large for the locals to handle it themselves; things like this are why we have a Federal government at all.
So what did the Feds do? Day 1: Nothing. Day 2: Nothing. Day 3: Nothing. Oh wait, not quite nothing. Blanco complained that they were very interested in "negotiating an organizational chart," e.g. figuring out who would be in charge. And by Tuesday they did get around to trying to strong-arm her into abdicating her position as our elected leader and federalizing the state resources that remained viable.
Oh, and they did manage to turn back anyone who "self-responded" like the convoy of rescuers with boats who assembled from the Lafayette area the day after the storm. They managed to turn back the trucks of water offered by Wal-Mart. Yeah, the Feds weren't entirely idle in those first few days; they managed to fucking TURN AWAY what little aid our local people managed to assemble when the government failed them. They managed to order doctors at the airport NOT to save lives because they hadn't been "federalized."
And what turned FEMA from the heroes of hurricane Charley to the rat fuckers who probably killed hundreds of my neighbors as they waited in their attics? After 9/11 they were wrapped into the department of Homeland Security and their focus shifted from disaster relief (first priority: save lives) to anti-terrorism police (first priority: establish control of the situation).
You can't blame that on Clinton or the Democrats. That reorganization was this Republican Administration's idea, passed by this Republican congress. And while the newly cop-oriented FEMA was polishing their guns and turning away help that didn't arrive with the right paperwork, my neighbors died. For that reason alone they all deserve to be tossed out of office and charged with malfeasance.
I must have missed the day the motto changed to "news for fascist whack jobs." Of course their mirror-image twins at democraticunderground.com aren't much more reliable, but they tend to be more polite. Neither site is a suitable source for science information.
While "we" were still using a lot of vacuum tubes in 1969, the Apollo program did not. Their computers were solid state; in fact, the onboard flight computers were the first ever built with integrated circuits, and the Apollo program absorbed a significant fraction of all the integrated circuits manufactured in those early years.
The Coleco Adam did this out of the box. Back when most computers booted into BASIC the Adam booted into this kind of typewriter mode, and was one keystroke away from a pretty good little word processor (for its time). To get BASIC or any other program you loaded it from a high-speed random access tape (what the Adam had instead of disk drives).
Slashdot Mirror
It used to be the running joke that any scientific research would claim to possibly be leading to a cure for cancer. Now I guess the new paradigm is that it can be fixing the New Orleans problem instead.
(localroger quietly hides his paid-for copy of Microsoft 8080 Basic from those days)
There are a lot of those tanks out on the road being driven by idiots who tailgate, speed, and take corners too fast. And that's not even to mention big trucks.
Because cars have to conform to safety and performance standards that preclude making them too underpowered or too light. The compact cars we have now (which regularly do get 40-50 MPG) already fare badly in a collision with a pickup truck, much less a tractor trailer. When all cars are as solid as motorcycles, all cars will be as dangerous as motorcycles. When a car that is only as solid as a motorcycle also can't accelerate or keep up with the other traffic, it makes a motorcycle seem like a Cadillac by comparison. Or would you try the experiment of driving one of the participants in the Solar Challenge on an unrestricted road alongside normal vehicles?
Disk and RAM storage are both called "memory" because in information theory terms they are different meatspace arrangements for doing exactly the same thing -- storing bits of information so that you can read them back. Early computer scientists didn't make much of a distinction because for one reason those early machines often used magnetic disk or drum storage the way we now use RAM. And early personal computers had no fixed disk storage, only floppy disks (if they even had those) which nobody would confuse with memory installed in the machine. So the terminology problem that was created before 1950 really didn't become a problem for average users until around 1990.
Use integer math. After all, the computer itself does...
(Note that the situation is a little different with the atmosphere, because the atmosphere has much less mass than the ocean and we've been mucking with a very sensitive feedback mechanism.)
Multiply a kilowatt or so per square meter insolation by the size of the ocean, take seven percent of that, and get back to me on whether you think it's enough.
or "Your Microsoft Outlook may be vulnerable" when I use webmail exclusively.
What I'm sure the author meant to say is that the light from the original supernova explosion would have arrived here 600 years ago.
W/R/T the current topic, I think some of the other comments have nailed why this book will never be made into a movie while Card is alive. I can't see anyone in Hollywood filming a depiction of a six year old brutally murdering a classmate, which is a central image in Ender's Game; if you snip that or soften it or make Ender too old, the story loses most of its punch.
Although I wrote the "asshat" article at kuro5hin, I wouldn't really consider it germane to this debate; and if it was, I would have just posted a link, not the entire article.
This Smithsonian article covers some of the same ground in much better and revealing detail. Via a diarist at dkos.
Also, the "LIARLIARLIAR" schtick suggests that the chances that he's over the age of 14 are also below 30%.
I may not be an expert in DP/DR planning, but I happen to live here and I have seen the process. I have watched things improve a little every time the city tries this. It is fucking annoying to watch a bunch of nerds sit in their mother's basements and pronounce how they would have handled the situation so much better and what a bunch of morons a bunch of people they never heard of before are.
We actually succeeded in getting more than a million people out of the city -- about 90% of the population -- in less than 48 hours. The people who are ragging on Nagin and Blanco for what they didn't do should actually be on their fucking knees thanking them for their efforts. This required coordination between more than 10 parishes and counties and two state governments.
I have been in these traffic jams. I have stayed at times because I weighed the traffic jam potential against the hurricane. I have watched them get better at it every time they try. What in the name of Bob makes you think they haven't been looking and learning?
For Katrina nearly every existing plan at the local level actually went smoothely, many for the first time ever. To complain that such-and-such other plan wasn't in place is stupid and rude. Maybe a few more cycles down the road there would have been bus evacuations. There was no infrastructure for that this time nor was there any sane reason for such infrastructure to have been introduced. It's very easy to show pictures of the flooded buses and yell "Nyahh nyaah" but there are damn good reasons those buses stayed where they were. A lot of this bullshit is propaganda that was deliberately constructed to deflect blame from FEMA, which did not content itself with merely not showing up in time to save hundreds of lives but actively thwarted the efforts of people and agencies that did show up. Do not talk to me about what Nagin and Blanco didn't do when FEMA was turning away rescuers and aid and ordering doctors not to work on dying people because their papers weren't in order.
No, I made the argument that they have been trying to do the impossible for more than a decade and finally managed to pull it off in the nick of time. Since this is not an episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide, we are impressed when someone manages to do even one impossible thing and we are assholes if we bitch that they did not manage to do five more.
And as I told the other guy, if you think you can do better come to NOLA and run for mayor. Thanks to the national-level propaganda blitz Nagin probably won't be re-elected, and you can show us how smart you are by comparison.
The feds said "get out of there" DAYS before it hit. Your own mayor didn't concur until it was too late.
This is absolutely untrue. I remember it QUITE well because I was in Detroit, MI on Friday evening, and went to bed thinking (along with the locals, the feds, the NOAA, and the rest of the country) that Katrina would be a cat 1 to cat 2 event for northern Florida. When I woke up Saturday morning I found out at the airport that it was going to be a cat 5 headed right up my arse.
About 36 hours later -- mid-day Sunday -- if you weren't out of town, it was too late. All previous evacuation planning had assumed a 72 hour window of opportunity, and we barely got 48 this time (and that realistically starting in the middle of the night). NOBODY was advising evacuation before Saturday morning, unless you count the "gee why does anybody live there at all" crowd. The fact that we managed to get everyone who had the means out in that time frame is a miracle. Nobody, including the people in charge, really expected it to work that well. It didn't work that well for Dennis a mere three weeks before. It had never worked that well in the 10 years or so that contraflow plans have been on the drawing board.
So where do you get this bullshit idea that "the Feds told us to get out days before?" Maybe from the same bullshit source that said those school buses were "intended for evacuation?" Here's a clue: Those school buses were "intended" to carry kids to school. Nobody in their right mind would have loaded them up with people when their most likely fate based on all of our experience would be to get caught out on a gridlocked overwater crossing when the hurricane arrived.
However vulnerable they are, buildings are safer than vehicles on the road in a hurricane. We live here. We know that.
Had Katrina spared us as so many other threats did, we might have gotten around to forming bus plans in the future. It's not as simple as it sounds. You have to have places to drive the buses to, and you have to have a plan for getting them back if the hurricane doesn't hit. And you have to expect the evacuation to succeed, which it never had in the past. We got that right just in time. It's easy for back-seat drivers who have never seen NOLA to snipe about what we coulda shoulda done, but out here on the porch it ain't that simple when you ain't got the 20/20 hindsight and you don't know what the fucking storm is actually going to do.
I will repeat this: I live here. I flew home only to evacuate 24 hours later myself. I have watched local officials prepare for this kind of event for my entire life. Kindly refrain from telling me how things are in my home when you obviously have no clue what you are talking about, kthx.
That's right, there's a cat 5 hurricane less than 48 hours away, and you want people to get on boats. That's almost as brilliant as the idiots who said anybody who stayed should have walked out. As for the public transportation, see my reply above -- this was the first time ever that the evacuation actually worked. Who in their right mind would get on a bus that experience says will almost certainly be caught in gridlocked traffic anyway?
Had Katrina spared the city, I have no doubt that some of the non-insane plans (buses, definitely; boats? puh-leez) would have been added to the agenda. It's not just a matter of saying "Hey, we got buses, roll 'em!" You need drivers, you need destinations, you need (most difficult of all) a plan to get the buses back if the hurricane doesn't hit. It's easy to sit in New York or San Francisco or wherever and tell us what should have been done, but the bottom line is you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about.
Of course, since people like you who don't live here and aren't aware of any of this know so much better than we do how to handle the situation, how's about next time there's a cat 5 hurricane barreling our way you shag your own fat ass down to NOLA and show us how it's done, 'k?
here. Google turns up many more ("katrina"+"flotilla"+"turned back"). A lot of the reporting is partisan, but can you blame them? There is little doubt that it happened.
If Katrina had spared us that probably would have been the next thing on the agenda. Of course there's a lot more to it than cranking up the buses and driving them toward Houston; you have to have destinations lined up, and because you have to also plan for the hurricane NOT to hit you also have to have a plan for getting the buses back. Of course it's easy to forget little details like that if you're back-seat driving and ragging on the locals to deflect attention from the high-level failures.
Sorry, but I did not know that "the administration" was elected as governor of the state of Louisianna and the mayor of New Orleans. Oh wait, no... they weren't. It seems odd how they "mismanaged" this relief effort but did just fine and dandy during the most recent Wilma that hit Florida.
Sorry bub, but I happen to live in New Orleans. The governor and mayor did everything possible with the resources at their disposal, including the first ever truly successful contraflow evacuation of such a large American city. Afterward, with their resources scattered and the city under water, they begged the federal government for help. While the storm was still raging governor Blanco was on the phone with FEMA telling them what we would need -- helicopters, water, food, and tents, in more or less that order. Contrary to what you may have read in some quarters all of the paperwork was filled out properly and submitted ahead of time. The state of emergency was declared.
The Katrina disaster was much too large for the locals to handle it themselves; things like this are why we have a Federal government at all.
So what did the Feds do? Day 1: Nothing. Day 2: Nothing. Day 3: Nothing. Oh wait, not quite nothing. Blanco complained that they were very interested in "negotiating an organizational chart," e.g. figuring out who would be in charge. And by Tuesday they did get around to trying to strong-arm her into abdicating her position as our elected leader and federalizing the state resources that remained viable.
Oh, and they did manage to turn back anyone who "self-responded" like the convoy of rescuers with boats who assembled from the Lafayette area the day after the storm. They managed to turn back the trucks of water offered by Wal-Mart. Yeah, the Feds weren't entirely idle in those first few days; they managed to fucking TURN AWAY what little aid our local people managed to assemble when the government failed them. They managed to order doctors at the airport NOT to save lives because they hadn't been "federalized."
And what turned FEMA from the heroes of hurricane Charley to the rat fuckers who probably killed hundreds of my neighbors as they waited in their attics? After 9/11 they were wrapped into the department of Homeland Security and their focus shifted from disaster relief (first priority: save lives) to anti-terrorism police (first priority: establish control of the situation).
You can't blame that on Clinton or the Democrats. That reorganization was this Republican Administration's idea, passed by this Republican congress. And while the newly cop-oriented FEMA was polishing their guns and turning away help that didn't arrive with the right paperwork, my neighbors died. For that reason alone they all deserve to be tossed out of office and charged with malfeasance.
I must have missed the day the motto changed to "news for fascist whack jobs." Of course their mirror-image twins at democraticunderground.com aren't much more reliable, but they tend to be more polite. Neither site is a suitable source for science information.
While "we" were still using a lot of vacuum tubes in 1969, the Apollo program did not. Their computers were solid state; in fact, the onboard flight computers were the first ever built with integrated circuits, and the Apollo program absorbed a significant fraction of all the integrated circuits manufactured in those early years.
The Coleco Adam did this out of the box. Back when most computers booted into BASIC the Adam booted into this kind of typewriter mode, and was one keystroke away from a pretty good little word processor (for its time). To get BASIC or any other program you loaded it from a high-speed random access tape (what the Adam had instead of disk drives).