"galactic collisions aren't expected to have bad results for life living on their planets"
oh look mom! that star is getting bigger, really quickly! uhhh, mom? uhhh.............x
You underestimate just how big space is. You'd have to be very unlucky (astronomically so!) to be hit by a star passing through, or even to have one come close enough to significantly change the orbit of your planet. More likely is that some gas clouds will collide, which will trigger star formation from the increased density and shockwaves. That in turn is likely to increase the UV/X-Ray output of stars in the galaxy (because the formed stars are more likely to be big ones) and that might make things more hazardous. (It depends on how close we are to a star-forming region. Did I mention that space is big yet?)
But its billions of years away. I think I'll recommend to skip the worrying for at least the duration of our civilization...
You must have spitting fire when GCJ created the ability to compile Java to native machine code.
While I don't like GCJ, the reason for that is that it has proved incapable of building/running any application I'm interested in. I'm not just interested in Java as a (fussy and bureaucratic) language, I'm interested in it for the libraries, frameworks and applications that are written in it. That ecosystem (which happens to be pretty strongly security-related in my case) is critical; without it, I'd use something nice like a scripting language...
Hmm. I've noticed a perverse kind of...obsession among management types to 'get rid of IT.' I don't know if it's inter-company politics, or pure jealousy, but the talk / attempts lately seem more...intense. There is no real reasoning behind their desire to remove IT, just a feeling.
It does vary between organizations, but it's probably down to IT being seen as a cost center and a roadblock. On the first point, you need someone in charge of IT who can explain what value IT provides to the rest of the organization (remember, being a cost center isn't a problem if those are justifiable costs that enable other parts to be very profitable) and on the second, try not to spend your time saying "no"; it's far better to be able to say "can't do it this way, alas, but if we change things slightly to that way then we'll be able to make things work well". And try to avoid getting stuck with Compliance; everyone hates those guys.
[Desktop support] is also about "how do I do X" and "I can't access the Internet". Both of which require hands on help, if not always, certainly often.
Accessing support on the cloud when the 'net is down is... challenging. (True story: we had a taste of that yesterday due to a bad BGP route pushed by an upstream provider. Irritating as blazes — Slashdot was one of the sites I had trouble reaching — but fascinating to watch and see which of our core services had been outsourced.)
The main issue is that the damage to the road varies proportional to the fourth power of the weight of the vehicle; limiting the weight means you don't need to mend the road nearly so often.
Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...
Excessive hyperbole detected. The web was pretty awful and slow in 1993; it was all forms and fully synchronous page loads and total inability to find anything. Remember, you're two years before the first public appearance of Java and JavaScript at that point. Five years pre-Google. The company that created Flash (though never gave it that name) was founded in 1993.
Silverlight would have done very well if it had been released in 1997 (a mere 10 years prior to its actual release) assuming that the computers of the time and networks of the time could have coped. As it is, it never had the traction; too many developers were never interested in switching. (Myself? I just didn't care. Still don't.)
40 minute long hot showers also costs a lot on the water and gas bills.
In fact, heating water is one of the more expensive things in energy terms (water has quite a large thermal capacity, after all). A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation leads to the cost of a 40 minute shower as being somewhere in the region of 10-12 kWh. (Standard US shower flow rate is 2.5 gallons per minute, and assuming that you're looking to raise the water temperature by around 50F.)
Science is all about a systematic way to study testable things and make predictions about them, so a definitely untestable idea isn't a scientific theory. It might be a hypothesis, or an interpretation, or any number of other things, but it is not a theory.
An example of something that is not scientific at all is this: "The Flying Spaghetti Monster created everything instantaneously 10 minutes ago, including all evidence of things before and all your memories." Whether or not it is true, it is completely untestable and science will therefore say nothing about it.
because most diseases seem to be caused by multiple rare mutations.
[There goes my moderations...]
What matters is not usually any individual gene, but rather how a network of genes interacts; if a particular mutation makes a protein less efficient at its job, the usual effect is just to ramp up the quantity of it produced, or maybe of a precursor or successor in the network. What's more, the most likely mutations to happen turn out to be ones that have relatively little effect on gene function (e.g., they swap one acidic amino acid for another). When it comes to analysis of the meaning of a mutation, you first find its Consequences (i.e., is it one of these "normal" mutations that just slightly impacts on efficiency, or is it more profound) and that of the other genes in the network that it is associated with, together with how they are regulated in the cell. Then you see what the overall effect is under circumstances found in the cell — if the network is driven hard the same way as normal, there's no overall effect to speak of other than slightly variant sensitivity — and try to map up to the levels of tissues, organs and the whole body.
The first part of that, understanding the gene network, is proteomics. The second part, coupling between the cell and the body, is the forefront of modern physiology. Both are really tough problems (e.g., gene networks are modeled as large collections of differential equations, and the physiological mapping requires complex finite element modeling and fluid dynamics, depending on the organ) but they appear to be at least possible to attack with lots of computation and cutting edge scientific research.
Our states are larger than many of your European countries.
Being bigger than Belgium isn't something particularly special in the grand scheme of things. (Heck, according to at least one definition, Paris is bigger than Belgium.)
Wasn't her mom also named Queen Elizabeth, and wasn't said mother a queen consort of Ireland?
Her mother was indeed Queen Elizabeth, but wasn't a reigning queen of anywhere (her husband was king). The mother was considered to be Queen of the whole of Ireland for a while (through her marriage); Ireland only became a republic in 1949. The daughter was never queen of any part of Ireland other than the 6 counties that make up Northern Ireland (which remains part of the UK).
None of which is particularly important in the grand scheme of things.
The European Super Grid is a great idea but when it is night in Europe and Africa there is little or no solar power input. Note I say little because there will be a few plants that store heat to be used at night.
You seem to be assuming that demand will be constant throughout day and night, an interesting supposition but really without any foundation in reality. You also seem to be assuming that solar-produced power is the only thing that will be transmitted. Here's a clue; the electrons don't care.
To connect Europe with North America would require a 5000km transmission line through a very deep ocean that is seismically active.
Oh no! We have to run a cable from Europe to North America! It's never been done before!!! Not even for telecommunications, and we've never been able to create anything like the sort of cable that would be needed...
Next time you want to say something's impossible, please pick something that's actually impossible (like writing a computer program that will determine if any computer program will produce an answer), instead of just a plain old tricky engineering problem.
And then there are other things like games, which you get online, which often launch at $50-60 in the US and AUD 100 ($102 right now) here. For the same thing, delivered over the internet.
But those poor poor distributors have to pay for the game to be shipped to you over your narrow and long tubes. Oh wait, you pay for that part too via your network subscription...
The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?
Now we're going with apps, we can make it an unskippable video describing how this is reducing paperwork instead. Go, go, government progress!
Permanent as in ongoing perpetual expansion like a stereotypical overseas military base, or permanent as in we've not decided when to abandon ship yet? The danger of not being in perpetual expansion mode is you'll probably end up like the ISS, in construction for 99% of its lifetime and the week after the last bolt is tightened, its time to deorbit and give up. Permanent as in we intend to expand or improve this base to the tune of $1B/yr in perpetuity is a pretty good idea. Project management with a defined yet nebulous end date after which its managerially abandonded is a great idea for making "a" disposable rocket engine. Its a terrible idea for an entire base, or a station, or even a vehicle program.
Technically, a project has got to have a defined timeframe and goals. If you're going to maintain it indefinitely then you manage it as a product or service.
In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:
* An elevation change
* Enough water input to account for evaporation
That's pretty much it. And it's cheap.
The problem is that while there's mostly plenty of water, there's very little in the way of suitable sites left. Large parts of the UK are chalk and limestone, which are totally the wrong geology for any kind of hydro scheme (the rock is just too permeable), and the shales that make up a lot of the rest aren't too much better (too unstable). Of the rest, it's usually either too flat or full of human habitation (or both).
As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of plants with such a design; it's not an extra. When you see price per kWh quoted on such a solar thermal power plant, that's the price you pay. And solar thermal prices have been dropping pretty quickly over the years.
Solar's the wrong tech for large scale deployment this far north (all the UK is north of 50N, except for one small headland). There's also damn little suitable rock for geothermal (the UK is a long way from plate boundaries and hot-spots). Wind, wave and tidal make a lot more sense, but so does nuclear and conventional thermal.
Personally, I find the idea of private prosecutions frightening.
It's an old part of common law, and dates predates the existence of public prosecutors. The Founding Fathers would have recognized them and thought them reasonably normal. In the UK, the legal device is mostly used by local governments (in relation to child protection and certain types of highly antisocial behavior) and the RSPCA (in relation to animal cruelty). The downside of bringing a private prosecution is that it leaves the accused open to a claim of malicious prosecution, which public prosecutors (and judges) are generally exempt from when acting in their official capacity.
Actually those representatives can't do much : they don't have legislative iniative ( they can't create laws ) , they can only reject, amend or propose legislation
In your haste to vent, you've neglected to mention the Council of Ministers, which is absolutely the most powerful of the lot since nothing happens without their approval. (The Council is made up of the relevant national elected representatives of each member state in the relevant area; e.g., for agricultural business, it is made up of agriculture ministers.) Since they have the power to kill any proposal stone dead, the Commission always tries to make sure they're happy before bringing any proposed directives forward for approval; they don't try nearly so hard to keep the Parliament happy.
The real process is one of eternal tedious discussion until everyone in the Council agrees to vote for a proposal brought forward by the Commission (though sometimes a population-weighted majority vote is enough, it is common practice to try for unanimity). This makes decision-taking very slow, especially when some states are particularly intransigent on some topic (witness the Greek crisis, which has a lot of its roots in the inability for EU states to agree on anything rapidly).
In Apple's case they are attempting to use waste gas coming from a landfill which is mostly methane. It's not renewable per se but much greener than drilling.
It's enormously better than the alternatives. The landfill is producing methane gas anyway (dumping organic matter tends to make that happen) so it's not like it is being specially produced. What's more, methane is a hugely more powerful gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to generating global warming; it's far more efficient at trapping heat itself, it catalyzes the generation of ozone in the atmosphere (itself a heat-trapping gas, as well as otherwise general Bad News when in the troposphere) and eventually it breaks down all the way to CO2 anyway. Far better to burn the methane that would have been otherwise vented and get some useful power out of it than just about any other alternative you can think of (and the second best alternative is actually to just burn that methane as it is produced). Of course, if it was possible to prevent the formation of the methane in the first place then that would potentially be better still, but that's not a realistic option.
In short, whether or not you consider it a renewable option is moot; it's definitely the green option.
And just so you know, Authentication is dead. If I've got malware on your machine, then I don't care how strong your password, OTP and biometric security is. I'm going to wait for you to login and then take over your session in the background.
No, that's just a different class of attack. You've got to protect against both (and many others besides).
"revoked their qualified immunity when acting in egregious violation of law" -- I would be surprised if they could do that retroactively, and I think the purpose of this letter was to do just that for the future.
Technically, what has happened has been just that a reminder has been sent out that says that Federal law (including multiple parts of the Constitution) has prohibited this sort of thing for a very long time. Thus, immunity is not being revoked; the cops never had it in the first place. That's a very important distinction, as it means that past bad behavior is entirely prosecutable (and by the Feds too, so cosy local stitch-ups aren't enough to keep the cops safe either).
Except it's not much like it at all. The second-chamber systems in the UK and US are really very different. In particular, the UK system is all appointed, with both political members and experts nominated.
Slashdot Mirror
"galactic collisions aren't expected to have bad results for life living on their planets"
oh look mom! that star is getting bigger, really quickly! uhhh, mom? uhhh.............x
You underestimate just how big space is. You'd have to be very unlucky (astronomically so!) to be hit by a star passing through, or even to have one come close enough to significantly change the orbit of your planet. More likely is that some gas clouds will collide, which will trigger star formation from the increased density and shockwaves. That in turn is likely to increase the UV/X-Ray output of stars in the galaxy (because the formed stars are more likely to be big ones) and that might make things more hazardous. (It depends on how close we are to a star-forming region. Did I mention that space is big yet?)
But its billions of years away. I think I'll recommend to skip the worrying for at least the duration of our civilization...
You must have spitting fire when GCJ created the ability to compile Java to native machine code.
While I don't like GCJ, the reason for that is that it has proved incapable of building/running any application I'm interested in. I'm not just interested in Java as a (fussy and bureaucratic) language, I'm interested in it for the libraries, frameworks and applications that are written in it. That ecosystem (which happens to be pretty strongly security-related in my case) is critical; without it, I'd use something nice like a scripting language...
Hmm. I've noticed a perverse kind of...obsession among management types to 'get rid of IT.' I don't know if it's inter-company politics, or pure jealousy, but the talk / attempts lately seem more...intense. There is no real reasoning behind their desire to remove IT, just a feeling.
It does vary between organizations, but it's probably down to IT being seen as a cost center and a roadblock. On the first point, you need someone in charge of IT who can explain what value IT provides to the rest of the organization (remember, being a cost center isn't a problem if those are justifiable costs that enable other parts to be very profitable) and on the second, try not to spend your time saying "no"; it's far better to be able to say "can't do it this way, alas, but if we change things slightly to that way then we'll be able to make things work well". And try to avoid getting stuck with Compliance; everyone hates those guys.
[Desktop support] is also about "how do I do X" and "I can't access the Internet". Both of which require hands on help, if not always, certainly often.
Accessing support on the cloud when the 'net is down is... challenging. (True story: we had a taste of that yesterday due to a bad BGP route pushed by an upstream provider. Irritating as blazes — Slashdot was one of the sites I had trouble reaching — but fascinating to watch and see which of our core services had been outsourced.)
The 40 ton limit is a legal one.
The main issue is that the damage to the road varies proportional to the fourth power of the weight of the vehicle; limiting the weight means you don't need to mend the road nearly so often.
Potential that could have been useful in, say, 1993...
Excessive hyperbole detected. The web was pretty awful and slow in 1993; it was all forms and fully synchronous page loads and total inability to find anything. Remember, you're two years before the first public appearance of Java and JavaScript at that point. Five years pre-Google. The company that created Flash (though never gave it that name) was founded in 1993.
Silverlight would have done very well if it had been released in 1997 (a mere 10 years prior to its actual release) assuming that the computers of the time and networks of the time could have coped. As it is, it never had the traction; too many developers were never interested in switching. (Myself? I just didn't care. Still don't.)
40 minute long hot showers also costs a lot on the water and gas bills.
In fact, heating water is one of the more expensive things in energy terms (water has quite a large thermal capacity, after all). A quick back-of-an-envelope calculation leads to the cost of a 40 minute shower as being somewhere in the region of 10-12 kWh. (Standard US shower flow rate is 2.5 gallons per minute, and assuming that you're looking to raise the water temperature by around 50F.)
An untested idea isn't science?
Science is all about a systematic way to study testable things and make predictions about them, so a definitely untestable idea isn't a scientific theory. It might be a hypothesis, or an interpretation, or any number of other things, but it is not a theory.
An example of something that is not scientific at all is this: "The Flying Spaghetti Monster created everything instantaneously 10 minutes ago, including all evidence of things before and all your memories." Whether or not it is true, it is completely untestable and science will therefore say nothing about it.
because most diseases seem to be caused by multiple rare mutations.
[There goes my moderations...]
What matters is not usually any individual gene, but rather how a network of genes interacts; if a particular mutation makes a protein less efficient at its job, the usual effect is just to ramp up the quantity of it produced, or maybe of a precursor or successor in the network. What's more, the most likely mutations to happen turn out to be ones that have relatively little effect on gene function (e.g., they swap one acidic amino acid for another). When it comes to analysis of the meaning of a mutation, you first find its Consequences (i.e., is it one of these "normal" mutations that just slightly impacts on efficiency, or is it more profound) and that of the other genes in the network that it is associated with, together with how they are regulated in the cell. Then you see what the overall effect is under circumstances found in the cell — if the network is driven hard the same way as normal, there's no overall effect to speak of other than slightly variant sensitivity — and try to map up to the levels of tissues, organs and the whole body.
The first part of that, understanding the gene network, is proteomics. The second part, coupling between the cell and the body, is the forefront of modern physiology. Both are really tough problems (e.g., gene networks are modeled as large collections of differential equations, and the physiological mapping requires complex finite element modeling and fluid dynamics, depending on the organ) but they appear to be at least possible to attack with lots of computation and cutting edge scientific research.
Our states are larger than many of your European countries.
Being bigger than Belgium isn't something particularly special in the grand scheme of things. (Heck, according to at least one definition, Paris is bigger than Belgium.)
Wasn't her mom also named Queen Elizabeth, and wasn't said mother a queen consort of Ireland?
Her mother was indeed Queen Elizabeth, but wasn't a reigning queen of anywhere (her husband was king). The mother was considered to be Queen of the whole of Ireland for a while (through her marriage); Ireland only became a republic in 1949. The daughter was never queen of any part of Ireland other than the 6 counties that make up Northern Ireland (which remains part of the UK).
None of which is particularly important in the grand scheme of things.
The European Super Grid is a great idea but when it is night in Europe and Africa there is little or no solar power input. Note I say little because there will be a few plants that store heat to be used at night.
You seem to be assuming that demand will be constant throughout day and night, an interesting supposition but really without any foundation in reality. You also seem to be assuming that solar-produced power is the only thing that will be transmitted. Here's a clue; the electrons don't care.
To connect Europe with North America would require a 5000km transmission line through a very deep ocean that is seismically active.
Oh no! We have to run a cable from Europe to North America! It's never been done before!!! Not even for telecommunications, and we've never been able to create anything like the sort of cable that would be needed...
Next time you want to say something's impossible, please pick something that's actually impossible (like writing a computer program that will determine if any computer program will produce an answer), instead of just a plain old tricky engineering problem.
And then there are other things like games, which you get online, which often launch at $50-60 in the US and AUD 100 ($102 right now) here. For the same thing, delivered over the internet.
But those poor poor distributors have to pay for the game to be shipped to you over your narrow and long tubes. Oh wait, you pay for that part too via your network subscription...
The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?
Now we're going with apps, we can make it an unskippable video describing how this is reducing paperwork instead. Go, go, government progress!
Permanent as in ongoing perpetual expansion like a stereotypical overseas military base, or permanent as in we've not decided when to abandon ship yet? The danger of not being in perpetual expansion mode is you'll probably end up like the ISS, in construction for 99% of its lifetime and the week after the last bolt is tightened, its time to deorbit and give up. Permanent as in we intend to expand or improve this base to the tune of $1B/yr in perpetuity is a pretty good idea. Project management with a defined yet nebulous end date after which its managerially abandonded is a great idea for making "a" disposable rocket engine. Its a terrible idea for an entire base, or a station, or even a vehicle program.
Technically, a project has got to have a defined timeframe and goals. If you're going to maintain it indefinitely then you manage it as a product or service.
In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:
* An elevation change
* Enough water input to account for evaporation
That's pretty much it. And it's cheap.
The problem is that while there's mostly plenty of water, there's very little in the way of suitable sites left. Large parts of the UK are chalk and limestone, which are totally the wrong geology for any kind of hydro scheme (the rock is just too permeable), and the shales that make up a lot of the rest aren't too much better (too unstable). Of the rest, it's usually either too flat or full of human habitation (or both).
As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of plants with such a design; it's not an extra. When you see price per kWh quoted on such a solar thermal power plant, that's the price you pay. And solar thermal prices have been dropping pretty quickly over the years.
Solar's the wrong tech for large scale deployment this far north (all the UK is north of 50N, except for one small headland). There's also damn little suitable rock for geothermal (the UK is a long way from plate boundaries and hot-spots). Wind, wave and tidal make a lot more sense, but so does nuclear and conventional thermal.
Personally, I find the idea of private prosecutions frightening.
It's an old part of common law, and dates predates the existence of public prosecutors. The Founding Fathers would have recognized them and thought them reasonably normal. In the UK, the legal device is mostly used by local governments (in relation to child protection and certain types of highly antisocial behavior) and the RSPCA (in relation to animal cruelty). The downside of bringing a private prosecution is that it leaves the accused open to a claim of malicious prosecution, which public prosecutors (and judges) are generally exempt from when acting in their official capacity.
I thought they owned physical servers too, and buildings in which to put those machines. Those would count as assets.
Actually those representatives can't do much : they don't have legislative iniative ( they can't create laws ) , they can only reject, amend or propose legislation
In your haste to vent, you've neglected to mention the Council of Ministers, which is absolutely the most powerful of the lot since nothing happens without their approval. (The Council is made up of the relevant national elected representatives of each member state in the relevant area; e.g., for agricultural business, it is made up of agriculture ministers.) Since they have the power to kill any proposal stone dead, the Commission always tries to make sure they're happy before bringing any proposed directives forward for approval; they don't try nearly so hard to keep the Parliament happy.
The real process is one of eternal tedious discussion until everyone in the Council agrees to vote for a proposal brought forward by the Commission (though sometimes a population-weighted majority vote is enough, it is common practice to try for unanimity). This makes decision-taking very slow, especially when some states are particularly intransigent on some topic (witness the Greek crisis, which has a lot of its roots in the inability for EU states to agree on anything rapidly).
You "can" but I bet you still look at the radio every time you change the channel.
Why bother? They all have the same payola playlists.
Did someone patent using paragraphs and you decided to work around that by TYPING WORDS IN CAPS? It won't work...
In Apple's case they are attempting to use waste gas coming from a landfill which is mostly methane. It's not renewable per se but much greener than drilling.
It's enormously better than the alternatives. The landfill is producing methane gas anyway (dumping organic matter tends to make that happen) so it's not like it is being specially produced. What's more, methane is a hugely more powerful gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to generating global warming; it's far more efficient at trapping heat itself, it catalyzes the generation of ozone in the atmosphere (itself a heat-trapping gas, as well as otherwise general Bad News when in the troposphere) and eventually it breaks down all the way to CO2 anyway. Far better to burn the methane that would have been otherwise vented and get some useful power out of it than just about any other alternative you can think of (and the second best alternative is actually to just burn that methane as it is produced). Of course, if it was possible to prevent the formation of the methane in the first place then that would potentially be better still, but that's not a realistic option.
In short, whether or not you consider it a renewable option is moot; it's definitely the green option.
And just so you know, Authentication is dead. If I've got malware on your machine, then I don't care how strong your password, OTP and biometric security is. I'm going to wait for you to login and then take over your session in the background.
No, that's just a different class of attack. You've got to protect against both (and many others besides).
"revoked their qualified immunity when acting in egregious violation of law" -- I would be surprised if they could do that retroactively, and I think the purpose of this letter was to do just that for the future.
Technically, what has happened has been just that a reminder has been sent out that says that Federal law (including multiple parts of the Constitution) has prohibited this sort of thing for a very long time. Thus, immunity is not being revoked; the cops never had it in the first place. That's a very important distinction, as it means that past bad behavior is entirely prosecutable (and by the Feds too, so cosy local stitch-ups aren't enough to keep the cops safe either).
The House of Lords is more like the Senate.
Except it's not much like it at all. The second-chamber systems in the UK and US are really very different. In particular, the UK system is all appointed, with both political members and experts nominated.