At the "Mythbusters Live" event, one or the other of the guys claimed that Scottie left the show because while she liked the myth busting, she didn't like being on camera. The producers of the show really, wanted her to get more air-time (they know their audience, after all). She didn't like being pressured into being on-camera more, so she left.
There's a ton of software out there that uses the "write to new file with temporary name, then rename it to the final name" pattern, much of it written before Ext4 (or Ext3, or Ext) was designed, and rather a lot of it written before most of the folks on the Linux Kernel mailing list were even out of elementary school. This is a well-established method for reliably updating files, and it works, or fails gracefully, on almost every filesystem implementation from 1976 to the present day - except for Ext4.
Claiming that otherwise-portable software ought to include Linux-specific (not to mention Ext4-specific!) code to avoid massive data loss seems a bit backward.
Actually, what you'll most likely see is Mac OS X and iPhone OS getting more and more closely related, until there's really no difference between them. Currently, the iPhone OS is basically a subset of the Mac OS, with an additional user interface library (called UIKit). There's no reason UIKit can't be run on top of Mac OS X, and in fact, it already does, as part of the iPhone simulator.
Future versions of OS X will likely further reduce the differences between the two flavors, and make it even easier to design a single application that runs, without changes, in either a touch-based or mouse-based environment. With proper design, it's already really easy to separate out your UI and core functionality such that you can create an iPhone and a Mac application from the same sources. This is only going to get easier over time.
If they add Flash support to Safari on the iPhone, I'll just disable it. The number of sites where I use Flash is tiny, and there are better options for streaming media, which is the most-common reason for Flash on most websites.
The number of sites serving really annoying Flash-based ads is by far higher, and I don't want pages taking even longer to load than they already do.
I can see where a Flash runtime library to make it easier to port Flash games to the iPhone would be useful, though.
Did you read the legal brief? The key legal issue with the "Jailbreaking" applications is that they are used to distribute modified versions of Apple's bootloader and OS. If you wanted to write your own OS for the iPhone, you'd presumably be well within your rights to do so, but that's not what the jailbreakers are doing. They're taking Apple's software, modifying it, and posting it on the internet for others to download.
Its definitely not a TRIGA reactor - it's a sealed unit that uses the same style of Uranium Hydride fuel as the TRIGA design uses. That's what makes it "safe". Online sources say it doesn't have any moving parts, and uses hydrogen for coolant. Presumably it's convection cooled.
It's not clear how the steam-generation component can be maintenance-free, but it does only have a 5-year lifespan, so maybe that's reasonable.
You know, the application that patents were created for? The only (serious) problem with the patent system is that they've foolishly extended it to cover software, business processes, genes, and prime numbers, none of which are anything like the physical inventions that patents are designed to protect. While it may be true that these other types of "inventions" need some kind of government-guaranteed monopoly, patents are definitely the wrong mechanism.
If you apply the same protection to the payload container(s) that the military does to missile warheads, this should not be an issue
Exactly. Nuclear warheads for ICBM's are designed to be shot into space on a sub-orbital path, and come back down to near ground level with no damage (until they go off, of course). Granted that they're not designed to survive impact, but that's just a little more engineering.
Obviously, it can be done. It's "just" a matter of economics. The problem is getting enough fuel down to Mars such that you can get back up again. Add to that, the necessity of keeping the whole crew alive for 4 years (2 out, and two back) plus however long they have to stay on the surface.
You'd need a really massive spacecraft to accomplish all that. On the other hand, a one-way trip would have to carry a lot less fuel, hence a much smaller landing craft, hence much less fuel again...
Have you seen the maps that the settlers of the US western territories used? Not what you're probably thinking of when you make a mental image of "map", I assure you.
Most navigation of the West in the early days was done landmark-to-landmark. Between and around the known landmarks was just wide open empty spaces. A lot of settlement parties tried various promising shortcuts through places like the Great Salt Desert and Death Valley, which worked out well for some, less well for others.
You could probably even build a Plutonium-only nuclear plant, but that'd be pretty foolish, since the fuel elements would be ready-made nuclear-weapons components.
Waste becomes much less of a problem if you reprocess the fuel. We don't do that in the US because our nuclear policy is completely idiotic. But there's no rational reason not to do it.
I think that's overstating it a bit. The rational reasons for not reprocessing fuel revolve around the following issues:
1. Transporting used fuel to the reprocessing center and back.
2. Production and separation of enormous quantities of Plutonium, which needs to be carefully guarded due to proliferation and terrorism risks.
3. Some hazards in the reprocessing itself. There have been several serious accidents in reprocessing plants, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorp_nuclear_fuel_reprocessing_plant#2005_leak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident (and other incidents)
4. Reprocessing only really starts to make good economic sense if you bring fast breeder reactors online, and those have safety issues of their own.
Something like the IFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor) might substantially reduce these risks, but until an advanced breeder reactor is actually built and operated for a significant period, it's hard to say how safe they really are, and whether they'll make economic sense.
One of the events that Hellman talks about is a *failure of nuclear deterrence*. In that case, the casualties might well number in the millions to billions. How low does the probability of such an event need to be, for it to be an acceptable risk? Very, very low indeed.
Hence his call for better estimation of the risks involved in each step in the tree, and coordinated work to reduce those risks, where possible.
It does make a kind of sense, though. Die-cast aluminum has a very different "feel" than forged/milled aluminum. Cast metal will have weird "grain" effects around all the little details, as well.
And, really - it's not like the case is a major cost driver for these products. The CPU, hard drive, and memory are probably 90% of the material costs. If the crazy milled aluminum case adds even $5 to the cost of the case, I'd be shocked.
In return for the insanely-complex manufacturing process, they get a case that's lighter, stronger, and has that special Apple "coolness".
Imagine WoW, except every object in the world can be scripted. It's easy to spend a *lot* of time endlessly tweaking your autonomous bird flock, or tuning the parameters on your vehicles...
Their manufacturing plant is a former hard-disk factory. Which makes sense, since much of the coating equipment and the material-handling equipment would be similar. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of their equipment was pulled out of storage from the former factory owners for pennies on the dollar.
Some of the robots might be strictly for the gee-whiz factor, but given that they're trying to make a new technology economical, automating production as much as possible is just good sense.
Make the whole process so simple that any member of the electorate can understand it, not just PHD mathematicians. Physical security is something that everybody can understand. Multiple independent (or adversarial) observers is something that everybody can understand. Two different people counting each stack of ballots is straightforward. Marking circles on a piece of paper is something every American school kid is already an expert in by the time they get to high school, thanks to standardized testing.
It's not that hard. The vast majority of the supposed "benefits" of electronic voting are entirely illusory. Under the guise of making voting easier for folks with disabilities (which is a noble goal), we've thrown out thousands of years of accumulated knowledge about how to run a fair election.
It's probably been even longer for me since my last Chemistry class, but I'm pretty sure that can't work. The mechanical resonance frequency of those molecular bonds is going to be in the giga- or tera-hertz range, isn't it?
Sure, the ultrasound introduces energy into the system, but it's along the same lines as a stirrer - it'll speed up whatever reactions are naturally taking place, but not so much as to turn years into minutes.
I seem to remember that the CO2 diffuses into the ocean after that, rather than staying bound where you left it. A quick Google search returns conflicting results, though. There goes another hour of my life...
I was just going to do it myself, but my gut feel was that it was on the order of 10% or so. Thanks for the confirmation. Losing 10-15% off the top for carbon neutrality seems like a no-brainer. Hopefully the technology scales up to megaton levels reasonably well, and they have a good solution for what to do with the CO2 once it's been scrubbed (the article is thin on details).
Done. Okay, not on the computer I'm currently using, but I've done this experiment before. Unless you've got a hellaciously-strong magnet, you simply won't be able to effect the proper functioning of a microchip with a magnetic field.
As other people have mentioned, there are very powerful magnets inside the hard drive, and as it turns out, the magnet isn't likely to stick to anywhere other than the voice coil or spindle motors, where it won't do any damage to the recording media.
shows that the coercivity of fridge magnets and hard disk media are approximately the same. In order for a fridge magnet to induce a change in the magnetic field of a HD platter, it'd have to practically be resting right on the platter itself.
Slashdot Mirror
At the "Mythbusters Live" event, one or the other of the guys claimed that Scottie left the show because while she liked the myth busting, she didn't like being on camera. The producers of the show really, wanted her to get more air-time (they know their audience, after all). She didn't like being pressured into being on-camera more, so she left.
There's a ton of software out there that uses the "write to new file with temporary name, then rename it to the final name" pattern, much of it written before Ext4 (or Ext3, or Ext) was designed, and rather a lot of it written before most of the folks on the Linux Kernel mailing list were even out of elementary school. This is a well-established method for reliably updating files, and it works, or fails gracefully, on almost every filesystem implementation from 1976 to the present day - except for Ext4.
Claiming that otherwise-portable software ought to include Linux-specific (not to mention Ext4-specific!) code to avoid massive data loss seems a bit backward.
Actually, what you'll most likely see is Mac OS X and iPhone OS getting more and more closely related, until there's really no difference between them. Currently, the iPhone OS is basically a subset of the Mac OS, with an additional user interface library (called UIKit). There's no reason UIKit can't be run on top of Mac OS X, and in fact, it already does, as part of the iPhone simulator.
Future versions of OS X will likely further reduce the differences between the two flavors, and make it even easier to design a single application that runs, without changes, in either a touch-based or mouse-based environment. With proper design, it's already really easy to separate out your UI and core functionality such that you can create an iPhone and a Mac application from the same sources. This is only going to get easier over time.
If they add Flash support to Safari on the iPhone, I'll just disable it. The number of sites where I use Flash is tiny, and there are better options for streaming media, which is the most-common reason for Flash on most websites.
The number of sites serving really annoying Flash-based ads is by far higher, and I don't want pages taking even longer to load than they already do.
I can see where a Flash runtime library to make it easier to port Flash games to the iPhone would be useful, though.
Did you read the legal brief? The key legal issue with the "Jailbreaking" applications is that they are used to distribute modified versions of Apple's bootloader and OS. If you wanted to write your own OS for the iPhone, you'd presumably be well within your rights to do so, but that's not what the jailbreakers are doing. They're taking Apple's software, modifying it, and posting it on the internet for others to download.
In order to develop apps for the store, you have to (electronically) sign a document that says you will not use undocumented functions.
Its definitely not a TRIGA reactor - it's a sealed unit that uses the same style of Uranium Hydride fuel as the TRIGA design uses. That's what makes it "safe". Online sources say it doesn't have any moving parts, and uses hydrogen for coolant. Presumably it's convection cooled.
It's not clear how the steam-generation component can be maintenance-free, but it does only have a 5-year lifespan, so maybe that's reasonable.
You know, the application that patents were created for? The only (serious) problem with the patent system is that they've foolishly extended it to cover software, business processes, genes, and prime numbers, none of which are anything like the physical inventions that patents are designed to protect. While it may be true that these other types of "inventions" need some kind of government-guaranteed monopoly, patents are definitely the wrong mechanism.
Exactly. Nuclear warheads for ICBM's are designed to be shot into space on a sub-orbital path, and come back down to near ground level with no damage (until they go off, of course). Granted that they're not designed to survive impact, but that's just a little more engineering.
Here's some info on Cassini's RTG generators, which is about as close a comparison as you're likely to see:
http://www.aboutnuclear.org/view.cgi?fC=Space,History,RTG_Safety
Obviously, it can be done. It's "just" a matter of economics. The problem is getting enough fuel down to Mars such that you can get back up again. Add to that, the necessity of keeping the whole crew alive for 4 years (2 out, and two back) plus however long they have to stay on the surface.
You'd need a really massive spacecraft to accomplish all that. On the other hand, a one-way trip would have to carry a lot less fuel, hence a much smaller landing craft, hence much less fuel again...
Have you seen the maps that the settlers of the US western territories used? Not what you're probably thinking of when you make a mental image of "map", I assure you.
Most navigation of the West in the early days was done landmark-to-landmark. Between and around the known landmarks was just wide open empty spaces. A lot of settlement parties tried various promising shortcuts through places like the Great Salt Desert and Death Valley, which worked out well for some, less well for others.
Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
You could probably even build a Plutonium-only nuclear plant, but that'd be pretty foolish, since the fuel elements would be ready-made nuclear-weapons components.
I think that's overstating it a bit. The rational reasons for not reprocessing fuel revolve around the following issues:
1. Transporting used fuel to the reprocessing center and back.
2. Production and separation of enormous quantities of Plutonium, which needs to be carefully guarded due to proliferation and terrorism risks.
3. Some hazards in the reprocessing itself. There have been several serious accidents in reprocessing plants, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorp_nuclear_fuel_reprocessing_plant#2005_leak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident
(and other incidents)
4. Reprocessing only really starts to make good economic sense if you bring fast breeder reactors online, and those have safety issues of their own.
Something like the IFR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor) might substantially reduce these risks, but until an advanced breeder reactor is actually built and operated for a significant period, it's hard to say how safe they really are, and whether they'll make economic sense.
One of the events that Hellman talks about is a *failure of nuclear deterrence*. In that case, the casualties might well number in the millions to billions. How low does the probability of such an event need to be, for it to be an acceptable risk? Very, very low indeed.
Hence his call for better estimation of the risks involved in each step in the tree, and coordinated work to reduce those risks, where possible.
I haven't ever looked at one of those keyboards close up. I had always assumed they were stamped, rather than machined.
The prior Pope did actually explicitly apologize for the crusades, among other things.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1071456
The current Pope has also apologized for other failings of the Catholic church.
It does make a kind of sense, though. Die-cast aluminum has a very different "feel" than forged/milled aluminum. Cast metal will have weird "grain" effects around all the little details, as well.
And, really - it's not like the case is a major cost driver for these products. The CPU, hard drive, and memory are probably 90% of the material costs. If the crazy milled aluminum case adds even $5 to the cost of the case, I'd be shocked.
In return for the insanely-complex manufacturing process, they get a case that's lighter, stronger, and has that special Apple "coolness".
Imagine WoW, except every object in the world can be scripted. It's easy to spend a *lot* of time endlessly tweaking your autonomous bird flock, or tuning the parameters on your vehicles...
Their manufacturing plant is a former hard-disk factory. Which makes sense, since much of the coating equipment and the material-handling equipment would be similar. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some of their equipment was pulled out of storage from the former factory owners for pennies on the dollar.
Some of the robots might be strictly for the gee-whiz factor, but given that they're trying to make a new technology economical, automating production as much as possible is just good sense.
I'd think that metal tubes would make it hard for the light to reach the active coating on the inside. Their tubes doi have metal end caps, though...
Make the whole process so simple that any member of the electorate can understand it, not just PHD mathematicians. Physical security is something that everybody can understand. Multiple independent (or adversarial) observers is something that everybody can understand. Two different people counting each stack of ballots is straightforward. Marking circles on a piece of paper is something every American school kid is already an expert in by the time they get to high school, thanks to standardized testing.
It's not that hard. The vast majority of the supposed "benefits" of electronic voting are entirely illusory. Under the guise of making voting easier for folks with disabilities (which is a noble goal), we've thrown out thousands of years of accumulated knowledge about how to run a fair election.
It's probably been even longer for me since my last Chemistry class, but I'm pretty sure that can't work. The mechanical resonance frequency of those molecular bonds is going to be in the giga- or tera-hertz range, isn't it?
Sure, the ultrasound introduces energy into the system, but it's along the same lines as a stirrer - it'll speed up whatever reactions are naturally taking place, but not so much as to turn years into minutes.
I seem to remember that the CO2 diffuses into the ocean after that, rather than staying bound where you left it. A quick Google search returns conflicting results, though. There goes another hour of my life...
I was just going to do it myself, but my gut feel was that it was on the order of 10% or so. Thanks for the confirmation. Losing 10-15% off the top for carbon neutrality seems like a no-brainer. Hopefully the technology scales up to megaton levels reasonably well, and they have a good solution for what to do with the CO2 once it's been scrubbed (the article is thin on details).
Done. Okay, not on the computer I'm currently using, but I've done this experiment before. Unless you've got a hellaciously-strong magnet, you simply won't be able to effect the proper functioning of a microchip with a magnetic field.
As other people have mentioned, there are very powerful magnets inside the hard drive, and as it turns out, the magnet isn't likely to stick to anywhere other than the voice coil or spindle motors, where it won't do any damage to the recording media.
This table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercivity#Experimental_determination
shows that the coercivity of fridge magnets and hard disk media are approximately the same. In order for a fridge magnet to induce a change in the magnetic field of a HD platter, it'd have to practically be resting right on the platter itself.