Neither does the submitter, since there's no way Lord Grantham would talk that way about "commoners".
Oh, I don't know. The aristocratic class on Downton Abbey often seem to express confusion when those "below them" even talk about concepts of concern to the ordinary worker. Witness, for example, Dame Maggie Smith (the Dowage Countess) completely befuddled when someone talks about having time off from work on the weekend to attend to other things in his life: "What is a week-end?"
I think there are plenty of workers in office environments who also believe that their bosses have no concept of what a "weekend" is supposed to be.
Or, as one former employer liked to call it: "72-hour Friday".
If nothing else you could chemically analyze the dust to find its origin but dust storm remnants crossing the Atlantic have been tracked by satellite so it's know to happen.
Also isotopically.
However, A) I'm quite familiar with all the local (within 500 miles) types of sand and B) that's where the Weather Service said it came from.
C) you can sometimes see it in the satellite pictures off the western coast of Africa. When hurricane season is at its peak, that's where the big storms come from, so I keep an eye on it.
You are indeed correct about this. On the other hand, 'no pollution allowed' isn't very economical either,
Zero emissions is the only safe and fair way to proceed. It's not even impossible.
If paying for the externalities makes the business unprofitable, it probably shouldn't be in business.
Yes, you have it exactly. That's why we need a zero-emissions requirement. You must never emit toxics and you must balance all other externalities, e.g. fixing carbon. Anything else is uncivilized bullshit.
Extremism doesn't work.
Destroy all the factories. Put out all the fires. Put us all back to the Stone Age and beyond.
Pollution gone? Nope. The landscape is littered with natural pollutants. Asbestos. Mercury, Arsenic, radioactive Xenon gas seeping up through the limestone. Even Uranium. So much that for an extended period of time, Africa actually had a naturally-occuring atomic reactor. Natural fires. Toxic lakes. There are some places people simply cannot live and stay healthy.
Rewind to the Industrial Era. The main differences are that we dig up a lot of these toxins and concentrate them closer to densely-inhabited areas. Plus, not being satisfied with that, we blend chemicals to make new toxins which are rare or non-existent in Nature.
Either way, we're not going to get a pristine "zero-emissions" environment. And attempting to do so is a task whose cost increases exponentially, the more toxins you remove.
Which is why we attempt to determine what the "safe" level of toxicity is. Because there are strong indications that biological life forms (including humans) don't react linearly to many irritants, but have a threshold. And where there isn't a strong threshold, we have to make the hard choice about what level of reduction we can afford.
Of course, when you start exporting cheap knock-off Chinese smog to LA, which prefers the higher-quality domestic smog, it's quite rude. Free Trade Agreements or no.
Forget particulates. Actual sand has been known to show up on my front doorstep (literally) transported across the Atlantic from the Sahara. And, from time to time, going the other direction from Kansas and Oklahoma.
If something that heavy can be transported that far, the only thing that would change with lighter particles is how much farther they disperse.
(sure, it's hardly torture, but nobody enjoys the flu).
Within the last month, 2 young women have died from the Flu in Florida. The Spanish Flu Epidemic of the early 20th Century was one of the greatest infectious killers since the end of the Plague.
While the offenders mostly get off scot-free, modern DNA analysis is such that if a customer or vendor dies these days, it's possible to trace back where the lethal strain came from (remember the Mexican kid from a year or 3 back?)
In today's litigious society, pressuring infected workers to show up at the office could be very, very expensive indeed.
That occurred to me to, but I think it is a safe bet that a pane of glass will *always* be cheaper than glass plus nanoparticles plus circuitry and power. That being said, I'm sure there's a point where it'll eventually become cheap enough to make an entire storefront window out of it, and realise some benefit from the visuals over more traditional forms of advertisement. Assuming storefronts still exist then, and assuming it becomes common to use, I'd move on to the main point. What's the big deal? Store windows basically are nothing *but* advertising...
Well, actually, what they were saying was that the actual display was a sheet of plastic stuck onto the glass. Meaning that you could retro-fit an existing window.
This could be even more interesting if it can be done as in the paperwhite displays, where the image consumes no power while static. You could then easily have your own programmable "stained glass" windows, Not to mention a new approach for automatically-shading windows.
Speaking of paperwhite displays, at least one major retailer has been peppering their stores with fairly sophisticated units, radio-updatable. So I doubt they'd balk at a reasonably-priced transparent display.
Employers with that attitude should be forced to pay pain and suffering for everyone who gets sick. I'll bet they would get a lot more liberal with sick leave after that.
They do pay. By losing productivity all around the office. And infecting customers with unneccessary illness. But because there are lots of people "working", they dismiss the loss.
Because too many bean-counters consider "productivity" solely on Time-in-Chair.
It's like an IT manager who has 100 3TB drives and bemoans a 3% annual failure rate because in his greed for "maximum efficiency", he loses 9TB of data each year when by accepting a "less efficient" RAID setup, he'd not be subject to loss and downtime.
How hard is it, exactly, to walk in to a credit union and walk out with a checkbook?
Remarkably hard, sometimes. I know someone with a steady employment record, good bill-paying history. Couldn't get a credit union account. Not enough debt.
The romans having silk does not mean they had contact with china. You know there is this mysterious ancient gild called 'traders'. Traders tended to trade between main trading points, e.g. from china to persia from persia to north africa, from africa to rome, or what ever more plausible route you come up with.
Please demonstrate a basic sorting algorithm that a non-programmer can understand that doesn't perform terribly on large lists. You might be able to write a bubble or insertion sort that makes sense to a layman, but for the majority of the population something like mergesort, quicksort, or heapsort is going to seem like voodoo no matter how elegantly it is coded.
I did one once. It was a Shell-Metzner sort.
The list was large, but almost completely ordered. In other words, a pathological worst case for the heaping sorts. Also a bad choice for basic bubble, but a Shell sort does a binary bubbling that was optimal for the data in question. And very welcome, since one of the main systems in our shop had to do this about 150 times a day.
"Efficient" means different things, depending on context.
That's the big trend these days. We must respect everyone's opinions equally. It doesn't matter if they are expert in a specific field or know nothing but what they see on the "news". All are of equal value. That's why we don't tell kids who are getting F's (do any of them get those any more?) that they are stupid. We let them find out what the world thinks of dummies after we push them along and graduate them. Then they find out that they are dopes and can't get/keep a job that pays a living wage (are there any of those any more?) and start taking antidepressants.
The US is in the death throws of democracy. Future generations (in other countries) will study this period of US history to try to figure out what happened. How did stupidity and ignorance get elevated to virtues?
Could be when spell-checkers made us sloppy about proper usage. It's "Death throes" unless you're talking wrestling.
Too many people think that their computer's spell checkers give them free reign to not tow the line and they loose all sense of rigor.
Actually, what I meant was that on mainframes and minicomputers, you'd just login as a different user on a different terminal. You'd have your own home directory and user environment independent of any other user on the system.
jails and chroots are essentially partial VMs, so I wasn't thinking of them.
The closest approximation on Windows would be Citrix, but Citrix works best when the apps have been written for multiple concurrent users, which isn't the norm for Windows apps.
Of course, VMs won't help much if doing hardware development, but with just one PC used by multiple people, VMs are pretty much the only way to go.
For Windows, maybe.
Those of us used to other OS's have been able to do that kind of stuff for almost forever, no VM required. Even with more than one person using the machine at the same time.
Probably because of the extremely high performance requirements. There's a lot of packets going through a 10Gbit interface and if you run some Python code for each of them you're gonna choke the machine.
That would be true if it were impossible to compile Python code to something efficient.
And the style of code used above (and typical network configuration scripts) would compile to something very efficient. In fact, a compiler can compile that code to the current configuration language whenever possible.
Systems like IPTABLES are based on declarative syntax. When you "program" by declaration, you are working with a limited syntax to perform limited functions. That also limits your flexibility, but the tradeoff is that the functions that you can do are so well-defined that you can be assured that anything you compile will operate in a way that minimizes surprises. It also means that you can optimize things more precisely because you don't have to support many possibilities, only a few. The #1 feature of declarative programming is that you don't have lots of loops and decisions to debug. Or optimize.
The "tables" part of IPTABLES also contributes to that functionality. There are a limited set of table types pre-defined with specific uses. By compiling the rules into tables, very efficient processing can be done. After all, optimized table handling is one of the oldest and most intensively-studied disciplines of Computer Science.
Even IPTABLES wasn't totally restricted to table-driven functions, though. As an extendable architecture, if you really wanted to, you could define your own abilities to the system, including modules incorporating user-written code. It's just that they had pre-defined and fine-tuned the most commonly-used features.
I'm skeptical of this system because it is at least the second (after 'Red Flag', possibly more of them than that, certainly a lot more if you count 'nationalist linux forks' generally, rather than just Chinese ones), and past attempts havent exactly set the world on fire with their success.
More generally, though, I'm skeptical largely because (at the present time) you basically have to shop like Richard Stallman (and possibly even harder than he does, if some TAO-level group has designs on you) to have a chance in hell to even see all the security-relevant software/firmware that goes into your system in anything other than a mixture of OSS components, proprietary userspace applications, and firmware blobs (often doing not-even-a-debugger-knows-what on the various totally undocumented application-specific processors hanging off various busses). So long as that's the case, even if your OS is FOSS and you've audited the hell out of it (odds are you haven't) and you have a robust security model designed to keep applications in check (obligatory XKCD, odds are that it will all come to nothing because your lowballing vendor has a BSP full of proprietary shit, your GPU vendor won't offer anything but a binary blob unless you abduct the entire Board's families and threaten to return them one slice at a time, and you don't have a clue what various surprisingly punchy microcontrollers and very-low-end ARM cores attached to dangerously useful (and mostly unexamined) busses are doing in their own memory spaces.
They have an advantage we don't, though.
They're the ones doing the hardware manufacturing.
If Team China manages to solve these problems(especially acute in cellphones because the cellular baseband which makes wifi interfaces look like GNU-paradise by comparison in terms of openness and robustness), then I'll be damn interested, no matter how much their 'yet another shitty fork of something that they could have just audited' linux-derivate OS bores me. If they don't manage to solve them, or don't even bother, that this is just some balance-of-trade enthusiast crying into his beer about Android's ubiquity in the Chinese smartphone market, who cares?
Do you think they would so proudly admit to being unable to read and write?
Yes actually. Maybe not the same set of people, but I find it entirely plausible that there exists a group of people who would find pride in that.
Allegedly medieval nobles were such a group. They were "too important" to be bothered with such trivialities, so they'd have a monk fetched to do such tasks for them.
Rather risky, though. You're taking someone else's word for what was actually written, and the Church often had its own agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just you, since I don't watch Downton Abbey
Neither does the submitter, since there's no way Lord Grantham would talk that way about "commoners".
Oh, I don't know. The aristocratic class on Downton Abbey often seem to express confusion when those "below them" even talk about concepts of concern to the ordinary worker. Witness, for example, Dame Maggie Smith (the Dowage Countess) completely befuddled when someone talks about having time off from work on the weekend to attend to other things in his life: "What is a week-end?"
I think there are plenty of workers in office environments who also believe that their bosses have no concept of what a "weekend" is supposed to be.
Or, as one former employer liked to call it: "72-hour Friday".
If nothing else you could chemically analyze the dust to find its origin but dust storm remnants crossing the Atlantic have been tracked by satellite so it's know to happen.
Also isotopically.
However, A) I'm quite familiar with all the local (within 500 miles) types of sand and B) that's where the Weather Service said it came from.
C) you can sometimes see it in the satellite pictures off the western coast of Africa. When hurricane season is at its peak, that's where the big storms come from, so I keep an eye on it.
You are indeed correct about this. On the other hand, 'no pollution allowed' isn't very economical either,
Zero emissions is the only safe and fair way to proceed. It's not even impossible.
If paying for the externalities makes the business unprofitable, it probably shouldn't be in business.
Yes, you have it exactly. That's why we need a zero-emissions requirement. You must never emit toxics and you must balance all other externalities, e.g. fixing carbon. Anything else is uncivilized bullshit.
Extremism doesn't work.
Destroy all the factories. Put out all the fires. Put us all back to the Stone Age and beyond.
Pollution gone? Nope. The landscape is littered with natural pollutants. Asbestos. Mercury, Arsenic, radioactive Xenon gas seeping up through the limestone. Even Uranium. So much that for an extended period of time, Africa actually had a naturally-occuring atomic reactor. Natural fires. Toxic lakes. There are some places people simply cannot live and stay healthy.
Rewind to the Industrial Era. The main differences are that we dig up a lot of these toxins and concentrate them closer to densely-inhabited areas. Plus, not being satisfied with that, we blend chemicals to make new toxins which are rare or non-existent in Nature.
Either way, we're not going to get a pristine "zero-emissions" environment. And attempting to do so is a task whose cost increases exponentially, the more toxins you remove.
Which is why we attempt to determine what the "safe" level of toxicity is. Because there are strong indications that biological life forms (including humans) don't react linearly to many irritants, but have a threshold. And where there isn't a strong threshold, we have to make the hard choice about what level of reduction we can afford.
Of course, when you start exporting cheap knock-off Chinese smog to LA, which prefers the higher-quality domestic smog, it's quite rude. Free Trade Agreements or no.
Forget particulates. Actual sand has been known to show up on my front doorstep (literally) transported across the Atlantic from the Sahara. And, from time to time, going the other direction from Kansas and Oklahoma.
If something that heavy can be transported that far, the only thing that would change with lighter particles is how much farther they disperse.
I want Soylent Brown.. A tasty coffee/chocolate breakfast version! High in caffeine!
I hope that's what it tastes like.
You wish.
(sure, it's hardly torture, but nobody enjoys the flu).
Within the last month, 2 young women have died from the Flu in Florida. The Spanish Flu Epidemic of the early 20th Century was one of the greatest infectious killers since the end of the Plague.
While the offenders mostly get off scot-free, modern DNA analysis is such that if a customer or vendor dies these days, it's possible to trace back where the lethal strain came from (remember the Mexican kid from a year or 3 back?)
In today's litigious society, pressuring infected workers to show up at the office could be very, very expensive indeed.
That occurred to me to, but I think it is a safe bet that a pane of glass will *always* be cheaper than glass plus nanoparticles plus circuitry and power. That being said, I'm sure there's a point where it'll eventually become cheap enough to make an entire storefront window out of it, and realise some benefit from the visuals over more traditional forms of advertisement.
Assuming storefronts still exist then, and assuming it becomes common to use, I'd move on to the main point. What's the big deal? Store windows basically are nothing *but* advertising...
Well, actually, what they were saying was that the actual display was a sheet of plastic stuck onto the glass. Meaning that you could retro-fit an existing window.
This could be even more interesting if it can be done as in the paperwhite displays, where the image consumes no power while static. You could then easily have your own programmable "stained glass" windows, Not to mention a new approach for automatically-shading windows.
Speaking of paperwhite displays, at least one major retailer has been peppering their stores with fairly sophisticated units, radio-updatable. So I doubt they'd balk at a reasonably-priced transparent display.
Employers with that attitude should be forced to pay pain and suffering for everyone who gets sick. I'll bet they would get a lot more liberal with sick leave after that.
They do pay. By losing productivity all around the office. And infecting customers with unneccessary illness. But because there are lots of people "working", they dismiss the loss.
Because too many bean-counters consider "productivity" solely on Time-in-Chair.
It's like an IT manager who has 100 3TB drives and bemoans a 3% annual failure rate because in his greed for "maximum efficiency", he loses 9TB of data each year when by accepting a "less efficient" RAID setup, he'd not be subject to loss and downtime.
When you're sick enough to (feel you) need medication, stay at home.
Don't spread germs all over the workplace / auditorium / public mass transport.
Sorry, but that's not how things work these days.
If you don't come in and work many hours every day then you are the obvious candidate for replacement by someone who will.
So suck down those anti-fever drugs and get to work!
How hard is it, exactly, to walk in to a credit union and walk out with a checkbook?
Remarkably hard, sometimes. I know someone with a steady employment record, good bill-paying history. Couldn't get a credit union account. Not enough debt.
The romans having silk does not mean they had contact with china. You know there is this mysterious ancient gild called 'traders'.
Traders tended to trade between main trading points, e.g. from china to persia from persia to north africa, from africa to rome, or what ever more plausible route you come up with.
And sometimes what they traded were slaves.
Reading other people's code is a great way to learn better ways of doing things you thought you already knew how to do. ;)
Reading the source code to the OS and compilers used at my school probably taught me more than the classes themselves.
It was good code. Most of the business code I've seen is more like pornography than great literature, though.
Please demonstrate a basic sorting algorithm that a non-programmer can understand that doesn't perform terribly on large lists. You might be able to write a bubble or insertion sort that makes sense to a layman, but for the majority of the population something like mergesort, quicksort, or heapsort is going to seem like voodoo no matter how elegantly it is coded.
I did one once. It was a Shell-Metzner sort.
The list was large, but almost completely ordered. In other words, a pathological worst case for the heaping sorts. Also a bad choice for basic bubble, but a Shell sort does a binary bubbling that was optimal for the data in question. And very welcome, since one of the main systems in our shop had to do this about 150 times a day.
"Efficient" means different things, depending on context.
Oops, I missed another. Your post should have read "lose all sense", not "loose all sense".
You're welcome!
Whoosh!
You still missed one.
Could be when spell-checkers made us sloppy about proper usage. It's "Death throes" unless you're talking wrestling.
Wouldn't you use a spelling checker instead of a spell checker, unless your name is Harry Potter?
I'd be more worried about Snape doing the spell-checking myself.
But apparently "spell check" is accepted usage. Probably England's fault. They like constructs such as that.
That's the big trend these days. We must respect everyone's opinions equally. It doesn't matter if they are expert in a specific field or know nothing but what they see on the "news". All are of equal value. That's why we don't tell kids who are getting F's (do any of them get those any more?) that they are stupid. We let them find out what the world thinks of dummies after we push them along and graduate them. Then they find out that they are dopes and can't get/keep a job that pays a living wage (are there any of those any more?) and start taking antidepressants.
The US is in the death throws of democracy. Future generations (in other countries) will study this period of US history to try to figure out what happened. How did stupidity and ignorance get elevated to virtues?
Could be when spell-checkers made us sloppy about proper usage. It's "Death throes" unless you're talking wrestling.
Too many people think that their computer's spell checkers give them free reign to not tow the line and they loose all sense of rigor.
Actually, what I meant was that on mainframes and minicomputers, you'd just login as a different user on a different terminal. You'd have your own home directory and user environment independent of any other user on the system.
jails and chroots are essentially partial VMs, so I wasn't thinking of them.
The closest approximation on Windows would be Citrix, but Citrix works best when the apps have been written for multiple concurrent users, which isn't the norm for Windows apps.
Of course, VMs won't help much if doing hardware development, but with just one PC used by multiple people, VMs are pretty much the only way to go.
For Windows, maybe.
Those of us used to other OS's have been able to do that kind of stuff for almost forever, no VM required. Even with more than one person using the machine at the same time.
No cycles to spare for running an interpreter
" nftables kernel engine adds a simple virtual machine into the Linux kernel, which is able to execute bytecode to inspect a network packet "
Wait, what, you didn't want an interpreter in your kernel?! TOO LATE.
There's likely more than one already.
Some interpreters can be extremely efficient. The threaded-code interpreter used by the original FORTH language, for example.
Probably because of the extremely high performance requirements. There's a lot of packets going through a 10Gbit interface and if you run some Python code for each of them you're gonna choke the machine.
That would be true if it were impossible to compile Python code to something efficient.
And the style of code used above (and typical network configuration scripts) would compile to something very efficient. In fact, a compiler can compile that code to the current configuration language whenever possible.
Systems like IPTABLES are based on declarative syntax. When you "program" by declaration, you are working with a limited syntax to perform limited functions. That also limits your flexibility, but the tradeoff is that the functions that you can do are so well-defined that you can be assured that anything you compile will operate in a way that minimizes surprises. It also means that you can optimize things more precisely because you don't have to support many possibilities, only a few. The #1 feature of declarative programming is that you don't have lots of loops and decisions to debug. Or optimize.
The "tables" part of IPTABLES also contributes to that functionality. There are a limited set of table types pre-defined with specific uses. By compiling the rules into tables, very efficient processing can be done. After all, optimized table handling is one of the oldest and most intensively-studied disciplines of Computer Science.
Even IPTABLES wasn't totally restricted to table-driven functions, though. As an extendable architecture, if you really wanted to, you could define your own abilities to the system, including modules incorporating user-written code. It's just that they had pre-defined and fine-tuned the most commonly-used features.
I'm skeptical of this system because it is at least the second (after 'Red Flag', possibly more of them than that, certainly a lot more if you count 'nationalist linux forks' generally, rather than just Chinese ones), and past attempts havent exactly set the world on fire with their success.
More generally, though, I'm skeptical largely because (at the present time) you basically have to shop like Richard Stallman (and possibly even harder than he does, if some TAO-level group has designs on you) to have a chance in hell to even see all the security-relevant software/firmware that goes into your system in anything other than a mixture of OSS components, proprietary userspace applications, and firmware blobs (often doing not-even-a-debugger-knows-what on the various totally undocumented application-specific processors hanging off various busses). So long as that's the case, even if your OS is FOSS and you've audited the hell out of it (odds are you haven't) and you have a robust security model designed to keep applications in check (obligatory XKCD, odds are that it will all come to nothing because your lowballing vendor has a BSP full of proprietary shit, your GPU vendor won't offer anything but a binary blob unless you abduct the entire Board's families and threaten to return them one slice at a time, and you don't have a clue what various surprisingly punchy microcontrollers and very-low-end ARM cores attached to dangerously useful (and mostly unexamined) busses are doing in their own memory spaces.
They have an advantage we don't, though.
They're the ones doing the hardware manufacturing.
If Team China manages to solve these problems(especially acute in cellphones because the cellular baseband which makes wifi interfaces look like GNU-paradise by comparison in terms of openness and robustness), then I'll be damn interested, no matter how much their 'yet another shitty fork of something that they could have just audited' linux-derivate OS bores me. If they don't manage to solve them, or don't even bother, that this is just some balance-of-trade enthusiast crying into his beer about Android's ubiquity in the Chinese smartphone market, who cares?
"It must be true, because we all say so!".
Chant of the bandar-log (monkeys) in Kipling's Jungle book.
Do you think they would so proudly admit to being unable to read and write?
Yes actually. Maybe not the same set of people, but I find it entirely plausible that there exists a group of people who would find pride in that.
Allegedly medieval nobles were such a group. They were "too important" to be bothered with such trivialities, so they'd have a monk fetched to do such tasks for them.
Rather risky, though. You're taking someone else's word for what was actually written, and the Church often had its own agenda.
I assume the answer is yes since the alternative is bugs, and there's no reason to ever ship bugs.
Tell that to Microsoft, Oracle, et al.
agreed, it sound theoretically possible minus the 8 mile claim.
Industrial-grade Pringles can.