So, cars can charge with DC much faster than with AC. What a great opportunity to innovate.
Solar panels generate DC, and it adds a lot to the cost and complexity to convert it to AC. How about co-locating car charging stations at solar power farms, and skipping the DC-AC conversion equipment. It is a win-win.
Many wind generators also have DC generators and convert to AC. Same opportunity there.
An AC motor - DC generator set should cost much less than $5000. It doesn't take a lot of horsepower to make lots of low voltage DC amps.
Con-Ed in New York City used to sell electric power in DC as well as AC. I think they dropped the DC in the 1980s (a NYC Slashdotter can probably set me strait there. ). Might there be other localities in this world where the utility still offers DC for sale?
I'm a blue water sailor. I've never seen floating trash out at sea. However, hardly a day goes by when I don't see a partially deflated helium balloon floating hundreds of miles from shore.
When a child looses a balloon they go up in the sky and drift with the wind. Within a few days they loose enough gas to sink to the surface. However, they retain enough gas to float on the water. The Mylar ones can last and float for years, surviving all weather and storms. They either wash ashore someplace, or they are swallowed by some creature which then may die. Rubber balloons do the same thing but they only last weeks, rather than years.
I can't help thinking that if mothers knew about the ultimate fate of those party balloons, they wouldn't buy them in the first place.
Billy Mitchell demonstrated the vulnerability of modern warships in 1921. Although the vulnerability of carriers seems to be a matter of common sense, to my knowledge there is no carrier Billy Mitchell yet.
If your company goes bankrupt, or is sold to another, all it's assets become the property of someone else. That someone cannot be constrained to respect anything you have promised. You may not even have the opportunity to wipe disks or change passwords.
For example, a hospital failed to pay the rent on a warehouse storing patient records. The landlord seized and sold those records as scrap. None of the hospital's patient privacy obligations transfer to the landlord, or to the scrap dealer.
Heed the advice of others who told you don't do it.
Before passage, the HIPPA bill was much debated. Privacy advocates wanted two big things, (a) opt-in rather than opt-out and (b) the right for patients to refuse permission for their health into to be used in ways they don't want while still receiving treatment. They privacy advocates lost.
The result is that now, when you visit the doctor you get a multi-page privacy disclosure. You are allowed to request changes in how your health info is treated. However, the provider has the right to refuse treatment if you request even the slightest deviation. That means that providers can write their software presuming that 100% of patients consent to the most invasive and insecure privacy practices.
It should be the right of every patient to forgo the advantages of digitally stored health records and to opt-out without being sent packing without treatment. One should even have the right to seek treatment anonymously and pay cash. Even that is forbidden by state and federal laws regarding record keeping by providers.
I'm afraid that the only way out for US citizens determined to protect their privacy is itself a felony. I speak of identity theft -- fraudulently using someone else's identity to get health care.
HIPPA was supposed to protect patient privacy. Instead, it merely adds to the mindless and wasteful bureaucracy of health care while institutionalizing privacy invasive practices, giving legal cover to abusers, and criminalizing individual tactics to protect themselves. In addition, HIPPA preempted many state laws that provided better privacy protections than HIPPA.
In the 1960s, Defense Secretary Mcnamara said that as few as three nuclear bombs exploded high above the USA could start every structure in North America on fire simultaneously. He was speaking to the point of how hard it would be to make effective defense. You might stop 3000 but if only 3 get through your day may still be ruined.
I was in college on the day of the Cuban missile crisis. I and everyone else in the dormitory that day thought that the world was going to end in 30 minutes. After that, we spent the next 30 years fatalistically believing that is was not a question if the world would be blown up but when. We all believed the "On The Beach" scenario as the only credible outcome.
Then in 1989, things changed abruptly. We dodged the bullet of extinction level war. I should say War. Not a nuclear war, but The War.
In the comments of this thread, I don't see that distinction coming out. Man could probably survive one or several global nuclear wars, as distinct from The War. war is a question of politics and power. War is a question of survival of the species (or should I say all species.)
Of course, War is still possible no matter how unlikely we like to believe. But I hate discussion of war as if it were War.
Consider the criticism on government for having failed to head off 9/11. Next consider the fact that the younger government employees will want to operate it in a 21st century way. Then, I think the logical extrapolation is to expect NSA to introduce the requirement that they can track communications retroactively.
Suppose some person X becomes suspicious. Then there will be an instant demand to examine all X's communications in recent years, together with those of X's contacts, and their contacts, N levels deep. NSA can't know in advance who X is, so they only way to meet that requirement is to intercept and archive everyone's communications all the time.
Consider the alternative. If they don't archive that stuff, and they could have, and if another 9/11 occurs, then the criticism will be wilting. They will be blamed for not doing everything possible to prevent it, They must do it as a matter of political self defense.
I posted something similar once before. Another slashdotter thought I was writing science fiction. I don't think so. I calculate that it could be done for 300 million Americans with only a dozen or so exabytes. Heck, pull out your Visa card and order an exabyte server from Oracle today. It is hardly beyond the capability of NSA.
I also believe that we privacy advocates also have to get our heads into the 21st century. It is time to shift focus from restricting government gathering of information to restricting government use of information already in their possession.
You're describing lagom samhället; in English mediocrity. Americans abhor that; they believe instead in excellence, the opposite of lagom. When I lived there with my family, I was shocked to learn that teachers in school held back the smartest students so that they would not stand out.
I used to think that attitude would be the downfall of all the Nordic countries. I must admit however, that they seem to be doing quite well.
My theory why socialism works well in Nordic countries but could never work here in the USA is homogeneity. Americans are diverse in their values and goals as well as opinions, Swedes aren't. The biggest threat to their socialism will come when they are forced to allow Muslims proportionate representation in decision making and authoritative jobs in industry and government.
This scenario repeats often in tech business. See the book "Computer Wars" by Charles Ferguson. The tough problem is that to reinvent itself, the company needs all new people. The founders, the board, the management, the engineers all need to fire themselves. Think of a future where Google or Apple needed to reinvent themselves as (horrors) a hydro fracking company. Probably none of their employees or facilities would be suitable to the new business.
GE is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule. In the 60s their main business was making heavy metal objects, and their cash cow was light bulbs. Then GE became an entertainment company (NBC) and a financial company (GE Credit). Those are really fundamental changes and GE did it successfully. Hats off to them.
If a company can not radically reinvent itself, the logical step would be to voluntarily liquidate and return the proceeds to stockholders so that they can invest in new companies. I can't recall ever hearing of that being done, except by family owned businesses. Unless management are also the major stockholders, they can't be brave enough to fire themselves.
Your imagination is seriously dated. Are you aware that we no longer use punched cards?
A database with 10GB per person for 300 million Americans needs only 3 exabytes (if I calculate correctly). That's hardly science fiction. Hell, Oracle will sell you one this afternoon, just pick up your phone and put it on your Visa card. Given the resources of NSA, it would be pocket change to archive that much data. Space probe projects are planning to use that much data per project.
I've assumed that the US government has been intercepting all our communications since they first had the technical ability. Why? Because of the 911 commission. Goverment really reacts and overreacts to that kind of stinging criticism that they didn't protect us.
What should we expect from them today? I expect that as soon as they find a terrorism suspect, that they are able to review his/her communications retrospectively; and also those whom he/she had contact with and so on 3 plys deep. To do that, they need an archive of everyone's messages 100% of the time, because they can't know in advance whose they want to review in the future.
I too hate big brother and I hate invasions of my privacy. However, it is unrealistic to expect the feds to not fully exploit 21st century technology. If we were smart, we would give up on trying to restrict what data they gather and focus on restricting what they can do with gathered information.
Consider the evidence. 100% of the people through history who drank water died, or will die. Ditto for those who breathed air. Clearly that proves that H2O and O2 must be deadly toxins.
If the EU can't disprove that, I guess they must ban them.
Wrong, not search but IP. If someone gives me an obscure domain name for a mail or NTP server, that's no easier than giving me an IP address in the first place. I type in the IP, and bookmark the result.
You're also neglecting adaptation to change. If notice were given that domain names will vanish, then mail, NTP and other similar services would soon find a way to make themselves easily discoverable via search.
I'm not arguing that I prefer search over DNS, but rather that it could work. I don't buy the argument that DNS is the one and only way to go for eternity.
Instead of domain names, we could just use search engines to locate any side. No domain names at all; just IP addresses. That would make Google and the other search engines happy, but a lot of others unhappy.
Indeed, many people today are lazy. They just type a keyword or a partial company name in the address/search bar of their brower and let autocomplete resolve that to a hit. Hell, that's even easier than using locally stored bookmarks. I see that as evidence that the trend is to eventually obsolete domain names anyhow.
I can think of lots of objections to doing it all by search engine, but I have a harder time convincing myself that it would be impractical and couldn't work.
I just read the entire paper. Before reading it I was neutral and largely ignorant of Los Alamos' problems and culture. After reading it I tend to believe that the culture there is indeed one of arrogance and privilege and that the author, Gusterson, is their mouthpiece.
The paper is not even close to a scientific treatment. It is a series of conclusions, allegations, and characterizations more suited to a letter to the editor (or a Slashdot rant like this one) than a NSF funded study report. He never once describes the scientific culture that is the subject, nor does he analyze it. Nor does he analyze the management. He simply hurls characterizations and insults at it. The paper reads like a list of grievances brought forward by a shop steward.
To use Gusterson's words against him. He says, "Recent condenmations of Los Alamos have been based on remarkably thin cartoonish descriptions of its culture." But his paper does exactly that, it seems to be based on remarkably thin cartoonish descriptions of the management.
I'm still ignorant of the actual culture at Los Alamos. However, if there was a calcified culture of arrogance and privilege, and that culture sent forth someone to present their views, I would expect it to sound exactly like Gustafson's paper. If that paper were the only evidence, I would say "Fire them all."
In the 70s there was a minicomputer called the Interdata 1. It had a speed knob. The idea was to allow slowing down the CPU enough to watch instructions execute one at a time for debug purposes. In real life, programmers criticized for writing too slow programs would try to crank the knob up another notch. They would twist harder and harder until the knob snapped off. Every Interdata 1 I ever saw had the knob snapped off.
Will global warming, propelled by overpopulation, drive homo sapiens to extinction? Or will the singularity, propelled by our intelligent machines, bring the singularity and transform us into non-corporeal homo-post-sapiens who don't need the earth any more. It appears to be a race to the finish line.
I think it would make a really fun SF novel; better than Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End.
Wow! Thanks for your substantial effort to educate me. I think I do follow what you wrote.
The key point is that you say HF and W behave different chemically. I was of the impression that isotopes of the same element always behave alike chemically.
Slashdot Mirror
So, cars can charge with DC much faster than with AC. What a great opportunity to innovate.
Solar panels generate DC, and it adds a lot to the cost and complexity to convert it to AC. How about co-locating car charging stations at solar power farms, and skipping the DC-AC conversion equipment. It is a win-win.
Many wind generators also have DC generators and convert to AC. Same opportunity there.
An AC motor - DC generator set should cost much less than $5000. It doesn't take a lot of horsepower to make lots of low voltage DC amps.
Con-Ed in New York City used to sell electric power in DC as well as AC. I think they dropped the DC in the 1980s (a NYC Slashdotter can probably set me strait there. ). Might there be other localities in this world where the utility still offers DC for sale?
Great idea! Apple could use those Nokia Hakapelitta snow tires as shockproof cases for iPhones.
Power iUsers could stick studded Hakapelitta cases down their pockets.
I'm a blue water sailor. I've never seen floating trash out at sea. However, hardly a day goes by when I don't see a partially deflated helium balloon floating hundreds of miles from shore.
When a child looses a balloon they go up in the sky and drift with the wind. Within a few days they loose enough gas to sink to the surface. However, they retain enough gas to float on the water. The Mylar ones can last and float for years, surviving all weather and storms. They either wash ashore someplace, or they are swallowed by some creature which then may die. Rubber balloons do the same thing but they only last weeks, rather than years.
I can't help thinking that if mothers knew about the ultimate fate of those party balloons, they wouldn't buy them in the first place.
Billy Mitchell demonstrated the vulnerability of modern warships in 1921. Although the vulnerability of carriers seems to be a matter of common sense, to my knowledge there is no carrier Billy Mitchell yet.
If your company goes bankrupt, or is sold to another, all it's assets become the property of someone else. That someone cannot be constrained to respect anything you have promised. You may not even have the opportunity to wipe disks or change passwords.
For example, a hospital failed to pay the rent on a warehouse storing patient records. The landlord seized and sold those records as scrap. None of the hospital's patient privacy obligations transfer to the landlord, or to the scrap dealer.
Heed the advice of others who told you don't do it.
Before passage, the HIPPA bill was much debated. Privacy advocates wanted two big things, (a) opt-in rather than opt-out and (b) the right for patients to refuse permission for their health into to be used in ways they don't want while still receiving treatment. They privacy advocates lost.
The result is that now, when you visit the doctor you get a multi-page privacy disclosure. You are allowed to request changes in how your health info is treated. However, the provider has the right to refuse treatment if you request even the slightest deviation. That means that providers can write their software presuming that 100% of patients consent to the most invasive and insecure privacy practices.
It should be the right of every patient to forgo the advantages of digitally stored health records and to opt-out without being sent packing without treatment. One should even have the right to seek treatment anonymously and pay cash. Even that is forbidden by state and federal laws regarding record keeping by providers.
I'm afraid that the only way out for US citizens determined to protect their privacy is itself a felony. I speak of identity theft -- fraudulently using someone else's identity to get health care.
HIPPA was supposed to protect patient privacy. Instead, it merely adds to the mindless and wasteful bureaucracy of health care while institutionalizing privacy invasive practices, giving legal cover to abusers, and criminalizing individual tactics to protect themselves. In addition, HIPPA preempted many state laws that provided better privacy protections than HIPPA.
I should have said:
if ( new_unit_price .LE. (unit_cost + min_margin) ) { return (unit_cost + min_margin); }
Ah, did you mean
if ( new_unit_price = (unit_cost + min_margin) ) { return (unit_cost + min_margin); }
?
In the 1960s, Defense Secretary Mcnamara said that as few as three nuclear bombs exploded high above the USA could start every structure in North America on fire simultaneously. He was speaking to the point of how hard it would be to make effective defense. You might stop 3000 but if only 3 get through your day may still be ruined.
I was in college on the day of the Cuban missile crisis. I and everyone else in the dormitory that day thought that the world was going to end in 30 minutes. After that, we spent the next 30 years fatalistically believing that is was not a question if the world would be blown up but when. We all believed the "On The Beach" scenario as the only credible outcome.
Then in 1989, things changed abruptly. We dodged the bullet of extinction level war. I should say War. Not a nuclear war, but The War.
In the comments of this thread, I don't see that distinction coming out. Man could probably survive one or several global nuclear wars, as distinct from The War. war is a question of politics and power. War is a question of survival of the species (or should I say all species.)
Of course, War is still possible no matter how unlikely we like to believe. But I hate discussion of war as if it were War.
Consider the criticism on government for having failed to head off 9/11. Next consider the fact that the younger government employees will want to operate it in a 21st century way. Then, I think the logical extrapolation is to expect NSA to introduce the requirement that they can track communications retroactively.
Suppose some person X becomes suspicious. Then there will be an instant demand to examine all X's communications in recent years, together with those of X's contacts, and their contacts, N levels deep. NSA can't know in advance who X is, so they only way to meet that requirement is to intercept and archive everyone's communications all the time.
Consider the alternative. If they don't archive that stuff, and they could have, and if another 9/11 occurs, then the criticism will be wilting. They will be blamed for not doing everything possible to prevent it, They must do it as a matter of political self defense.
I posted something similar once before. Another slashdotter thought I was writing science fiction. I don't think so. I calculate that it could be done for 300 million Americans with only a dozen or so exabytes. Heck, pull out your Visa card and order an exabyte server from Oracle today. It is hardly beyond the capability of NSA.
I also believe that we privacy advocates also have to get our heads into the 21st century. It is time to shift focus from restricting government gathering of information to restricting government use of information already in their possession.
You're describing lagom samhället; in English mediocrity. Americans abhor that; they believe instead in excellence, the opposite of lagom. When I lived there with my family, I was shocked to learn that teachers in school held back the smartest students so that they would not stand out.
I used to think that attitude would be the downfall of all the Nordic countries. I must admit however, that they seem to be doing quite well.
My theory why socialism works well in Nordic countries but could never work here in the USA is homogeneity. Americans are diverse in their values and goals as well as opinions, Swedes aren't. The biggest threat to their socialism will come when they are forced to allow Muslims proportionate representation in decision making and authoritative jobs in industry and government.
This scenario repeats often in tech business. See the book "Computer Wars" by Charles Ferguson. The tough problem is that to reinvent itself, the company needs all new people. The founders, the board, the management, the engineers all need to fire themselves. Think of a future where Google or Apple needed to reinvent themselves as (horrors) a hydro fracking company. Probably none of their employees or facilities would be suitable to the new business.
GE is perhaps the most famous exception to the rule. In the 60s their main business was making heavy metal objects, and their cash cow was light bulbs. Then GE became an entertainment company (NBC) and a financial company (GE Credit). Those are really fundamental changes and GE did it successfully. Hats off to them.
If a company can not radically reinvent itself, the logical step would be to voluntarily liquidate and return the proceeds to stockholders so that they can invest in new companies. I can't recall ever hearing of that being done, except by family owned businesses. Unless management are also the major stockholders, they can't be brave enough to fire themselves.
Your imagination is seriously dated. Are you aware that we no longer use punched cards?
A database with 10GB per person for 300 million Americans needs only 3 exabytes (if I calculate correctly). That's hardly science fiction. Hell, Oracle will sell you one this afternoon, just pick up your phone and put it on your Visa card. Given the resources of NSA, it would be pocket change to archive that much data. Space probe projects are planning to use that much data per project.
I've assumed that the US government has been intercepting all our communications since they first had the technical ability. Why? Because of the 911 commission. Goverment really reacts and overreacts to that kind of stinging criticism that they didn't protect us.
What should we expect from them today? I expect that as soon as they find a terrorism suspect, that they are able to review his/her communications retrospectively; and also those whom he/she had contact with and so on 3 plys deep. To do that, they need an archive of everyone's messages 100% of the time, because they can't know in advance whose they want to review in the future.
I too hate big brother and I hate invasions of my privacy. However, it is unrealistic to expect the feds to not fully exploit 21st century technology. If we were smart, we would give up on trying to restrict what data they gather and focus on restricting what they can do with gathered information.
Consider the evidence. 100% of the people through history who drank water died, or will die. Ditto for those who breathed air. Clearly that proves that H2O and O2 must be deadly toxins.
If the EU can't disprove that, I guess they must ban them.
Wrong, not search but IP. If someone gives me an obscure domain name for a mail or NTP server, that's no easier than giving me an IP address in the first place. I type in the IP, and bookmark the result.
You're also neglecting adaptation to change. If notice were given that domain names will vanish, then mail, NTP and other similar services would soon find a way to make themselves easily discoverable via search.
I'm not arguing that I prefer search over DNS, but rather that it could work. I don't buy the argument that DNS is the one and only way to go for eternity.
Instead of domain names, we could just use search engines to locate any side. No domain names at all; just IP addresses. That would make Google and the other search engines happy, but a lot of others unhappy.
Indeed, many people today are lazy. They just type a keyword or a partial company name in the address/search bar of their brower and let autocomplete resolve that to a hit. Hell, that's even easier than using locally stored bookmarks. I see that as evidence that the trend is to eventually obsolete domain names anyhow.
I can think of lots of objections to doing it all by search engine, but I have a harder time convincing myself that it would be impractical and couldn't work.
I just read the entire paper. Before reading it I was neutral and largely ignorant of Los Alamos' problems and culture. After reading it I tend to believe that the culture there is indeed one of arrogance and privilege and that the author, Gusterson, is their mouthpiece.
The paper is not even close to a scientific treatment. It is a series of conclusions, allegations, and characterizations more suited to a letter to the editor (or a Slashdot rant like this one) than a NSF funded study report. He never once describes the scientific culture that is the subject, nor does he analyze it. Nor does he analyze the management. He simply hurls characterizations and insults at it. The paper reads like a list of grievances brought forward by a shop steward.
To use Gusterson's words against him. He says, "Recent condenmations of Los Alamos have been based on remarkably thin cartoonish descriptions of its culture." But his paper does exactly that, it seems to be based on remarkably thin cartoonish descriptions of the management.
I'm still ignorant of the actual culture at Los Alamos. However, if there was a calcified culture of arrogance and privilege, and that culture sent forth someone to present their views, I would expect it to sound exactly like Gustafson's paper. If that paper were the only evidence, I would say "Fire them all."
In the 70s there was a minicomputer called the Interdata 1. It had a speed knob. The idea was to allow slowing down the CPU enough to watch instructions execute one at a time for debug purposes. In real life, programmers criticized for writing too slow programs would try to crank the knob up another notch. They would twist harder and harder until the knob snapped off. Every Interdata 1 I ever saw had the knob snapped off.
Will global warming, propelled by overpopulation, drive homo sapiens to extinction? Or will the singularity, propelled by our intelligent machines, bring the singularity and transform us into non-corporeal homo-post-sapiens who don't need the earth any more. It appears to be a race to the finish line.
I think it would make a really fun SF novel; better than Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End.
Wow! Thanks for your substantial effort to educate me. I think I do follow what you wrote.
The key point is that you say HF and W behave different chemically. I was of the impression that isotopes of the same element always behave alike chemically.
I don't understand. Why should tungsten isotopic abundances change over time on Earth as compared to in space?
Is is because the core has become enriched in heavier elements and that tungsten isotopes are formed as fission products of a depleted crust?
I second that motion. I have Einstein's book, published 1961 by the Einstein estate. "Relativity, The Special and General Theory"
It's very thin. It explains his thought experiments and allows you to understand without the higher math. It is excellent all around.
The only problem is that I have to re-read it every year or two because the concepts slip away.
Not since Multics has academia showed much ambition and imagination in computer science.