Here's a quote from the article, where they discuss this.
The vacuum pumps suck air out of ITER and "adsorb" waste helium from the fusion reaction, along with other debris created when hot plasma smashes into the reactor wall.
In a bit more detail:
They need to remove the Helium because it gets in the way of the reactants. They also need to be able to filter out whatever small amounts of waste that are generated by the plasma brushing the wall. Presumably reactions between the plasma and the walls would produce metallic hydrides, which are toxic, and in some cases potentially explosive. Not only that, but after a while, the entire inside of the reactor will be radioactive, from neutron activation. Again, this is small amounts of material, but they can't just spew it out into the air. Besides, they'll want to analyze it and see what's in it, since no one has ever run one of these for an extended period of time before.
The current DS (the DSi) has twice the processor speed and 4 times the memory of the original DS. WIth a little tweaking in the 3D hardware, it's not unreasonable to imagine them doubling the horizontal and vertical resolution of the screen on a new version - maybe even on this 4" screen version.
Old DS games would run pixel-doubled, and newer games would get the native resolution. That's what I'd do, anyway...
ZFS and HFS+ have nearly-identical limits on everything except number of files. The maximum size of files and volumes with HFS+ is 2^63 bytes, rather than 2^64 bytes for ZFS. On the number of files per volume, there's a more-significant difference, 2^32 vs 2^48.
I can (just) imagine someone running into the number-of-files limit in a non-pathologic case, in a few decades or so. On a terabyte-sized drive, if you divide the whole thing up into 2^32 tiny files, each file would be 255 bytes long. Actually, they wouldn't, because the minimum allocation unit on HFS+ is 512 bytes, and you wouldn't hit the number-of-files limit at all.
The allocation units scale up in size from there, so on a 330 Terabyte drive (which'll be average in 10 years, if trends continue), each file would take up at least 90KB. I still don't see that as much of a disadvantage. I wonder what the average file size on my current drives is? Certainly a *lot* of the bulk of the files are digital photos and audio/video files, which are several megabytes in size. File sizes for media are likely going to increase over time, from higher resolution.
Apple does not provide any such information in the sales reports - just aggregate sales per country / region. If you want to tell whether an app is pirated, you need to detect it some other way.
Leaving aside all the crazy storage pool stuff (great for servers, not necessarily that useful for desktops), there are some interesting features in ZFS that I hope make their way into Mac OS X in some filesystem.
Snapshots and Copy-On-Write filesystem clones seem like a great way to improve the Time Machine backup feature, and would make it easy for applications to provide backup-on-save very efficiently.
The compression and encryption features would likely be useful for some people. I don't think the increased filesystem limits (number of files, size of files) would matter for most folks.
Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.
Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 9 time(s) over the past 90 days.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 244 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-10-22, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-10-22.
Malicious software includes 12 trojan(s), 8 exploit(s), 6 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine.
Malicious software is hosted on 6 domain(s), including keymydomains.com/, ncenterpanel.cn/, updatedate.cn/.
2 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including keymydomains.com/, specialgt.com/.
This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS21844 (THEPLANET).
They should really perform this experiment in Antarctica, in the winter, somewhere near the South Pole (or at least, several hours from the nearest base). Make them eat pre-packaged food and recycled water, and breathe recycled air, for a year and a half, with only the habitat walls standing between themselves and a rapid death from hypothermia, and you'd have something that begins to approach the experience of traveling to Mars.
If we can't keep a crew alive for the required time period in a hostile environment on Earth, it's just stupid to think we're ready to plan to go to Mars.
Having been involved with certifying portable electronics for both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards, let me say that anything that kills off Bluetooth is alright with me. That's the most bizarre, obtuse standard it's ever been my displeasure to work with.
The folks at the Bluetooth SIG are nice enough to deal with, but their standard is ridiculously over-the-top. It's thousands of pages, and almost everything in it is optional. If I was looking for a case study in how not to develop a standard for interoperability, I know right where I'd start.
It's basically a miracle if anything other than passphrase-based connect and the Headset profile works between any two Bluetooth-enabled devices.
I simply don't buy the argument that smartphones need to be protected from malware to prevent bringing down the network. If that were the case, the cell carriers wouldn't provide USB dongles for laptops - nobody controls the software on those systems at all, and the sky hasn't fallen.
Yes, there's a potential for wide-spread infection if a cellphone gets a virus (due to the monoculture effect), but the cell network has to have some way of dealing with that problem anyway - the sorts of inspections that Apple, et al. are doing aren't going to prevent any bugs in shipping apps from being exploited in the wild, anyway.
So, iPod Touch and iPhone are two separate browsers on that graph, even though they're identical for web-browsing purposes. You could argue, I suppose, about whether iPod Touch even belongs in the "mobile" category. But it works for a lot of folks as a mobile internet device, wherever they have Wi-Fi access.
If you add iPod and iPhone together, they add up to 34.8 percent, which is more than Opera and the next two largest (BlackBerry and "Other") combined.
If dirt gets on the tag's lens, it'll likely have the same sort of effect as dirt on a camera lens does. You'll get somewhat decreased contrast, but the camera won't actually "see" the dirt on top of the tag, because it's focused at infinity, so it'll see "through" the dirty surface to the tag underneath.
If you submit the app with an availability date in the far future, it won't go live immediately after being approved. If you go in and change the availability date after you receive approval, it appears immediately.
Having said that, I always forget to do it this way.
In 2080, it'll only have been 108 years since the last moon landing. Some people already live that long currently. Given the current state of research into aging and the human genome, it's likely that some substantial improvements in maximum lifespan will be developed in the intervening time. I wouldn't be surprised if some folks of my generation (who were young kids at the time) will live to see 120 years of age or more. Not me, of course - I'm eating a sausage and cheese sandwich RIGHT NOW, actually. But some of the healthier ones will make it.
This applies equally well to any other conspiracy theorists, but I happen to have references handy for the UFO studies...
The US Government did organize a massive project, collecting data on UFO reports, called Project Blue Book. The project ran for almost 18 years, collected over 12,000 eyewitness reports, and concluded that UFO sightings likely did not represent visitation by extraterrestrials. The source reports have been made public under FOIA requests (and are readily available on the internet), and generally support the conclusion that the VAST majority of sightings are the result of misidentification of normal phenomena in the skies.
However, there are those pesky 6% of the reports which were categorized as "unknown". The UFO enthusiasts tend to see these reports as evidence of alien spacecraft visiting Earth, since the Air Force couldn't come up with a convincing conventional explanation for these reports. The skeptics maintain that the "unknowns" are simple cases of not having enough detail to determine exactly what the witnesses saw. More anecdotal evidence doesn't do much to sway opinion for either group.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to prove definitely whether or not any particular UFO report is made up, or a hallucination, or something ordinary that the viewer can't identify, or something really unusual. Lots of nominally reliable witnesses have seen strange lights in the sky, from pilots, to astronomers, to US Presidents.
Then there are the claims that Blue Book was simply a disinformation campaign, and that the "real" UFO knowledge is stashed somewhere else. Obviously, there's no way to disprove that the US government is hiding some information somewhere. Unless you're willing to believe in a massive, well-orchestrated conspiracy involving multiple governments though, it's hard to believe that some really compelling evidence wouldn't have leaked somewhere.
The Wikipedia article on Project Blue Book that I linked to above has lots of links to more information, including the prior projects Sign and Grudge. The "Project Blue Book Archive" at http://www.bluebookarchive.org/ looks interesting, but I haven't had a chance to look through it in any detail.
Total fees for undergraduates at Harvard were around $40,00 per year back in 2005. They've presumably gone up since then, but even at $50,000, and even if you get no financial assistance, that's "only" $200,000 for 4 years. If you graduate from Harvard with a degree in a high-demand area, and you don't make enough to pay all that back in less time than you took to incur the debt, while living a reasonable lifestyle, you're doing something wrong.
For those of us who had our sights set a bit lower, it's actually even easier to break even on your education.
Deep Space 1 and Deep Impact both were equipped with optical navigation software. I think that the big advantage of Pulsar-based navigation would be for missions substantially outside the solar system, where the star atlas would be less reliable. Without really high-speed propulsion at a substantial fraction of light speed, I think you'd be hard-pressed to design a spacecraft that would survive long enough to need to use Pulsars for location information.
"Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack"
"EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences. EMP will cover the wide geographic region within line of sight to the nuclear weapon. It has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of US society, as well as to the ability of the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power. "
This was in 1962, so microelectronics as we know them today didn't even exist yet. The damage would be much greater today. Also note that Starfish Prime wasn't designed to maximize EMP. There's good information about how that works in the Wikipedia article on EMP:
Basically, if you were to detonate a megaton-yield weapon over the continental US or Europe, it would cause substantial damage to the electrical infrastructure over a very large area.
Unless someone at CDC or your state health laboratories have cultured your virus, there's no way to be sure what you had. Actually, I bet they'd like to hear from you...
As far as I can recall, while some work (and a lot of promotion) was done on bomb-pumped X-ray lasers for SDI, there wasn't any experiment that definitively demonstrated the effect.
Wikipedia seems to agree, for what it's worth. I wish all my books weren't in storage - I'm sure this is mentioned in one of Richard Rhodes' books on the bomb, somewhere.
Standing in a puddle of dilute Nitric Acid, next to machines handling glowing-hot bars of steel, in an environment where every horizontal surface was covered in pitch-black, razor-sharp slag dust. I had to buy new shoes, and black stuff came up every time I coughed for a week or so. Steel mills may not be the worst possible place to work, but they're pretty awful.
The secret wasn't that they were testing nuclear weapons, that was well-known. What they were hoping to keep secret was that they had successfully transitioned from the practically unworkable cryogenic liquid-deuterium H-bomb, to a simple, reliable, solid-state weapon.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a quote from the article, where they discuss this.
In a bit more detail:
They need to remove the Helium because it gets in the way of the reactants. They also need to be able to filter out whatever small amounts of waste that are generated by the plasma brushing the wall. Presumably reactions between the plasma and the walls would produce metallic hydrides, which are toxic, and in some cases potentially explosive. Not only that, but after a while, the entire inside of the reactor will be radioactive, from neutron activation. Again, this is small amounts of material, but they can't just spew it out into the air. Besides, they'll want to analyze it and see what's in it, since no one has ever run one of these for an extended period of time before.
The current DS (the DSi) has twice the processor speed and 4 times the memory of the original DS. WIth a little tweaking in the 3D hardware, it's not unreasonable to imagine them doubling the horizontal and vertical resolution of the screen on a new version - maybe even on this 4" screen version.
Old DS games would run pixel-doubled, and newer games would get the native resolution. That's what I'd do, anyway...
I did mention that snapshots would be useful for a desktop system, specifically for backups...
ZFS and HFS+ have nearly-identical limits on everything except number of files. The maximum size of files and volumes with HFS+ is 2^63 bytes, rather than 2^64 bytes for ZFS. On the number of files per volume, there's a more-significant difference, 2^32 vs 2^48.
I can (just) imagine someone running into the number-of-files limit in a non-pathologic case, in a few decades or so. On a terabyte-sized drive, if you divide the whole thing up into 2^32 tiny files, each file would be 255 bytes long. Actually, they wouldn't, because the minimum allocation unit on HFS+ is 512 bytes, and you wouldn't hit the number-of-files limit at all.
The allocation units scale up in size from there, so on a 330 Terabyte drive (which'll be average in 10 years, if trends continue), each file would take up at least 90KB. I still don't see that as much of a disadvantage. I wonder what the average file size on my current drives is? Certainly a *lot* of the bulk of the files are digital photos and audio/video files, which are several megabytes in size. File sizes for media are likely going to increase over time, from higher resolution.
Apple does not provide any such information in the sales reports - just aggregate sales per country / region. If you want to tell whether an app is pirated, you need to detect it some other way.
Leaving aside all the crazy storage pool stuff (great for servers, not necessarily that useful for desktops), there are some interesting features in ZFS that I hope make their way into Mac OS X in some filesystem.
Snapshots and Copy-On-Write filesystem clones seem like a great way to improve the Time Machine backup feature, and would make it easy for applications to provide backup-on-save very efficiently.
The compression and encryption features would likely be useful for some people. I don't think the increased filesystem limits (number of files, size of files) would matter for most folks.
Yikes.
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.sparc.org/&hl=en
What is the current listing status for sparc.org?
Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.
Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 9 time(s) over the past 90 days.
What happened when Google visited this site?
Of the 244 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 3 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2009-10-22, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2009-10-22.
Malicious software includes 12 trojan(s), 8 exploit(s), 6 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine.
Malicious software is hosted on 6 domain(s), including keymydomains.com/, ncenterpanel.cn/, updatedate.cn/.
2 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including keymydomains.com/, specialgt.com/.
This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS21844 (THEPLANET).
They should really perform this experiment in Antarctica, in the winter, somewhere near the South Pole (or at least, several hours from the nearest base). Make them eat pre-packaged food and recycled water, and breathe recycled air, for a year and a half, with only the habitat walls standing between themselves and a rapid death from hypothermia, and you'd have something that begins to approach the experience of traveling to Mars.
If we can't keep a crew alive for the required time period in a hostile environment on Earth, it's just stupid to think we're ready to plan to go to Mars.
Having been involved with certifying portable electronics for both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards, let me say that anything that kills off Bluetooth is alright with me. That's the most bizarre, obtuse standard it's ever been my displeasure to work with.
The folks at the Bluetooth SIG are nice enough to deal with, but their standard is ridiculously over-the-top. It's thousands of pages, and almost everything in it is optional. If I was looking for a case study in how not to develop a standard for interoperability, I know right where I'd start.
It's basically a miracle if anything other than passphrase-based connect and the Headset profile works between any two Bluetooth-enabled devices.
I simply don't buy the argument that smartphones need to be protected from malware to prevent bringing down the network. If that were the case, the cell carriers wouldn't provide USB dongles for laptops - nobody controls the software on those systems at all, and the sky hasn't fallen.
Yes, there's a potential for wide-spread infection if a cellphone gets a virus (due to the monoculture effect), but the cell network has to have some way of dealing with that problem anyway - the sorts of inspections that Apple, et al. are doing aren't going to prevent any bugs in shipping apps from being exploited in the wild, anyway.
So, iPod Touch and iPhone are two separate browsers on that graph, even though they're identical for web-browsing purposes. You could argue, I suppose, about whether iPod Touch even belongs in the "mobile" category. But it works for a lot of folks as a mobile internet device, wherever they have Wi-Fi access.
If you add iPod and iPhone together, they add up to 34.8 percent, which is more than Opera and the next two largest (BlackBerry and "Other") combined.
If dirt gets on the tag's lens, it'll likely have the same sort of effect as dirt on a camera lens does. You'll get somewhat decreased contrast, but the camera won't actually "see" the dirt on top of the tag, because it's focused at infinity, so it'll see "through" the dirty surface to the tag underneath.
If you submit the app with an availability date in the far future, it won't go live immediately after being approved. If you go in and change the availability date after you receive approval, it appears immediately.
Having said that, I always forget to do it this way.
In 2080, it'll only have been 108 years since the last moon landing. Some people already live that long currently. Given the current state of research into aging and the human genome, it's likely that some substantial improvements in maximum lifespan will be developed in the intervening time. I wouldn't be surprised if some folks of my generation (who were young kids at the time) will live to see 120 years of age or more. Not me, of course - I'm eating a sausage and cheese sandwich RIGHT NOW, actually. But some of the healthier ones will make it.
This applies equally well to any other conspiracy theorists, but I happen to have references handy for the UFO studies...
The US Government did organize a massive project, collecting data on UFO reports, called Project Blue Book. The project ran for almost 18 years, collected over 12,000 eyewitness reports, and concluded that UFO sightings likely did not represent visitation by extraterrestrials. The source reports have been made public under FOIA requests (and are readily available on the internet), and generally support the conclusion that the VAST majority of sightings are the result of misidentification of normal phenomena in the skies.
However, there are those pesky 6% of the reports which were categorized as "unknown". The UFO enthusiasts tend to see these reports as evidence of alien spacecraft visiting Earth, since the Air Force couldn't come up with a convincing conventional explanation for these reports. The skeptics maintain that the "unknowns" are simple cases of not having enough detail to determine exactly what the witnesses saw. More anecdotal evidence doesn't do much to sway opinion for either group.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to prove definitely whether or not any particular UFO report is made up, or a hallucination, or something ordinary that the viewer can't identify, or something really unusual. Lots of nominally reliable witnesses have seen strange lights in the sky, from pilots, to astronomers, to US Presidents.
Then there are the claims that Blue Book was simply a disinformation campaign, and that the "real" UFO knowledge is stashed somewhere else. Obviously, there's no way to disprove that the US government is hiding some information somewhere. Unless you're willing to believe in a massive, well-orchestrated conspiracy involving multiple governments though, it's hard to believe that some really compelling evidence wouldn't have leaked somewhere.
The Wikipedia article on Project Blue Book that I linked to above has lots of links to more information, including the prior projects Sign and Grudge. The "Project Blue Book Archive" at http://www.bluebookarchive.org/ looks interesting, but I haven't had a chance to look through it in any detail.
According to this article:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=506710
Total fees for undergraduates at Harvard were around $40,00 per year back in 2005. They've presumably gone up since then, but even at $50,000, and even if you get no financial assistance, that's "only" $200,000 for 4 years. If you graduate from Harvard with a degree in a high-demand area, and you don't make enough to pay all that back in less time than you took to incur the debt, while living a reasonable lifestyle, you're doing something wrong.
For those of us who had our sights set a bit lower, it's actually even easier to break even on your education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_dynamics_and_control#Star_tracker
Deep Space 1 and Deep Impact both were equipped with optical navigation software. I think that the big advantage of Pulsar-based navigation would be for missions substantially outside the solar system, where the star atlas would be less reliable. Without really high-speed propulsion at a substantial fraction of light speed, I think you'd be hard-pressed to design a spacecraft that would survive long enough to need to use Pulsars for location information.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/congress/2004_r/04-07-22emp.pdf
A congressional report from 2004:
"Report of the Commission to Assess the
Threat to the United States from
Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack"
"EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of
catastrophic consequences. EMP will cover the wide geographic region within line of
sight to the nuclear weapon. It has the capability to produce significant damage to critical
infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of US society, as well as to the ability of the
United States and Western nations to project influence and military power. "
The Starfish Prime test affected streetlights, power cables, television sets, and radios more than 1500 km away:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime#The_explosion_itself
This was in 1962, so microelectronics as we know them today didn't even exist yet. The damage would be much greater today. Also note that Starfish Prime wasn't designed to maximize EMP. There's good information about how that works in the Wikipedia article on EMP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse
Basically, if you were to detonate a megaton-yield weapon over the continental US or Europe, it would cause substantial damage to the electrical infrastructure over a very large area.
The Influenza of 1918 Killed two to three times as many people as died in World War I, in just two years. Tens of millions of people died in 2 years.
http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/
Unless someone at CDC or your state health laboratories have cultured your virus, there's no way to be sure what you had. Actually, I bet they'd like to hear from you...
As far as I can recall, while some work (and a lot of promotion) was done on bomb-pumped X-ray lasers for SDI, there wasn't any experiment that definitively demonstrated the effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#X-ray_laser
Wikipedia seems to agree, for what it's worth. I wish all my books weren't in storage - I'm sure this is mentioned in one of Richard Rhodes' books on the bomb, somewhere.
That is, more or less, the mission statement of the Long Now Foundation (the folks designing and building the clock).
Standing in a puddle of dilute Nitric Acid, next to machines handling glowing-hot bars of steel, in an environment where every horizontal surface was covered in pitch-black, razor-sharp slag dust. I had to buy new shoes, and black stuff came up every time I coughed for a week or so. Steel mills may not be the worst possible place to work, but they're pretty awful.
The secret wasn't that they were testing nuclear weapons, that was well-known. What they were hoping to keep secret was that they had successfully transitioned from the practically unworkable cryogenic liquid-deuterium H-bomb, to a simple, reliable, solid-state weapon.