The WSJ article was apparently triggered by a letter sent by NERC (North American Electric Reliability Council) to its members. I think it shows a healthy development of security digging down to yet another layer of depth.
Forget the major computers in the major control centers. That's what everyone thinks of first. At that level it is becoming like the Indians and athropologists in the Grand Canyon. For every utility cyber worker there seems to be 30 government gumshoes and overseers looking over their shoulders. One would expect no aspects of security to be neglected at that level.
The NERC letter refers to devices at a lower level. Primarily, what the industry calls "protective relays" in substations. From 1888 to a few years ago these functions were really done with electromechanical relays. Now, many of them have been replaced by digital equivalents on a one-by-one basis. In a household analogy, it is like the difference between a central electric control computer for the house, as compared to a "smart" digital LED light bulb. One worries about the central computer being hacked, but at first blush, not the light bulb.
The problem is that the engineers who deal with this level of equipment aren't used to thinking of these devices like the light bulb instead of like computers in a network. They have not identified many of these low-level devices as "cyber critical". The NERC letter urges utilities to change that culture.
This is an industry that owns and maintains hundreds of millions of diverse pieces of equipment. Every day, some fraction of them are converted to digital. No single study, no single policy can change this infrastructure overnight. I think they are approaching cybersecurity thoroughly and methodically, but it will take time.
Remember Y2K? Roughly the same collection of hundreds of millions of devices were threatened by a common-mode failure (Y2K). It was very analogous to an external cyber attack. The utility industry tackled Y2K, thoroughly reviewed all those devices, and performed flawlessly on the morning of 1/1/2000.
My point? Sure we should worry about cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, but don't jump to the conclusion that no security exists or that nothing competent is being done about it.
I used to work in the nuclear power plant operator training industry. Believe me, whatever else those operators were, they were not cheap. The CEO could not skimp on salaries and hire idiots. In fact, in a time when $40K was an excellent salary, the training costs per operator was more than $1 million.
On the other hand, there were cultural obstacles. In Europe (Sweden), they hired engineers with masters degrees to become nuclear plant operators. In the USA, they were mostly high school grads who were union members and promoted from running older coal plants. Union politics, not merit decided who got promoted. They were not the best and brightest. Of course in Sweden they also attract the best and brightest to be civil servants. Can you imagine that happening here?
There are always plenty of suggestions as to where society should apply its best and brightest. It is much harder to place the worst and dumbest. Consider the bottom 25%. They have to have jobs. No matter where you assign them, the public will in some way be depending on those jobs being done well. So filling jobs becomes less of a question of rational allocation of resources, but more a matter of attractiveness and recruiting.
A plant operator must stand there and do nothing but monitor year after year, yet react swiftly and accurately in those rare seconds of pure terror, and then have the whole world second guess how well they did it. In addition, they have to do shift work for 24x7 operation. Most people think that it is a hell of an unattractive job. I think that the plant owners do a hell of a job trying to find and retain the best people they can get, and to enrich the jobs to make them less boring. It takes much more than deep pockets to succeed.
So you tell me. You play CEO and tell me how would you convince Google engineers to quit Google and become operators, and how many of the lower quartiles you would assign to invent Google. Convince those bright college students that they don't want to be environmental scientists, but nuclear power plant operators instead.
I read that even CAT scans and MRI scans lack clinical evidence that patients live longer if they have them instead of regular X-rays. But scans are a huge industry bringing in billions. Also, tens of millions of patients truly believe that they are getting better care if they have an MRI rather than a X-ray.
I also read that Medicare costs four times as much per patient in Miami than in LA. In Miami, doctors are scheduling Medicare patients for monthly MRI scans just on general preventative principles.
My point is that huge battles await government when it tries to truly reign in wasteful health care spending. Both the doctors and the patients will fight like hell, not to mention drug companies, and clinics. Congressmen on the other hand are cowards when it comes to bucking public passion.
I, for one, have little faith in our government's ability to manage such challenges. I think it will fail.
The US Copyright Office says that "Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans" are not copyrightable. Some titles and many slogans are much longer than 130 characters. That makes it a matter of interpretation for the courts to decide if 130 characters is or is not a title, short phrase or a slogan.
I don't think most judges would be amused to spend the court's time to decide such a case and they may toss it on the basis of De minimis non curat rex.
By the way, when researching this I found the following on the first page of the Copyright Offices FAQ list. "How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?" That itself is less than 130 characters. I think I'll go tweet "My sighting of Elvis."
Oh wow. I was one of the enthusiastic fans of Muse Software's Robot Wars for the Apple ][. It sounds to me like Soulskill has invented a way to re-create Robot Wars in a more real and more fun way.
Here's a description of the original game.
Create code for a robot using the provided programing language, limited to 256 lines of code. Test your robot on the test bench by examining the code line by line and determining whether the bot performs as intended. Then put your finished robot in the arena with up to four other bots, set the number of battles, and watch them fight it out in a top-down view. Computer Gaming world had annual contests for several years in which readers could send their bots on disk to participate in the match, with results and prizes reported in the magazine.
You won't be able to win this with the money argument. Microsoft will swarm all over you, giving free stuff away. They have a fund just to give away free licenses to anyone who's even thinking about trying open source.
Well then it's a win-win situation isn't it? If Microsoft cuts their license fees, then he will have saved money for the university. I would not call that losing the argument.
Every day we read about cell phones, MP3 players, game boxes, and even set-top boxes taking over and making PCs obsolete and irrelevant.
Microsoft was a monopolist only in the narrowly defined PC market. In the new-age market with non PC boxes included, Microsoft's share is small and growing still smaller every day.
If I were M's lawyer, I would judge that now is the time to make the argument that M's monopoly power is a thing of the past and that all EU and US restrictions should be dropped.
I don't buy that; not when the remedy is to expose all patient's information excessively to ease processing of a few trouble cases.
I believe that the health care industry is much more concerned with making their own jobs easier than they are about patient privacy.
Sure there can be issues with coverage, preferences and the like, but putting patient privacy at the bottom of the priority list sucks. Each patient should have the right to determine his own priorities regarding efficacy of treatment and payment versus privacy. The way the laws and E-commerce practices are going, they preclude such a right -- they force everyone into a one-solution-fits-all where third parties decided in advance what is in the patient's best interest.
Don't think that there aren't abuses associated with the process either. For example, drug companies gather info from pharmacies to gather stats on which drugs the doctors prescribe how often. They use those stats to target marketing efforts to convince the doctors to prescribe their brand more often. In what way is that unequivocally in the patient's best interest?
Lawyers in civil cases like car accidents can dig for and get info that a patient may have bought Prozac at some time in his/her life. They use that info to blackmail plaintiffs into dropping lawsuits or as evidence to a jury that the plaintiff is mentally unstable. Judges fail to rein in the discovery process to prevent such abuses.
We need to turn the approach to privacy on its head. Patients need the right to demand control on how their information is handled, and to put the burden of proof on the side of those who would expose the data. They need the ability to make their medical info out of reach of subpoena.
It is true most people don't give a damn about privacy, but that is insufficient reason to deny everybody the right to the degree of privacy they want.
As things stand today under HIPPA, patients either accept the government's rules or they abstain from medical treatment; even if they paid for it in advance. Abstinence is the only opt-out available in the USA -- that really sucks.
In the 1980s, a Scientific American article by David Chaum, and an article from Germany on electronic prescriptions (sorry, no links, it predated the web), educate me about the possibility of electronically secured prescriptions.
Basically, by creative use of encryption, it is possible to create an electronic prescription that (1) lets the pharmacy know that the prescription is authorized, and how it is paid for without revealing the name of the patient or the doctor. (2) similarly allow the insurer, the patient, the doctor and government, access to information they are authorized to have without disclosing anything more.
The same can be applied in all areas involving privacy and access to electronic records. Encryption can be used to actively limit access to authorized purposes without depending on the lack of human error.
Isn't is about time that we started using technology in these creative ways to achieve privacy levels as high as technology allows? How about an open source effort to publish papers and algorithmic examples showing how this can be done in an attempt to influence policy?
I'm a blue water sailor. I use Sirius off shore and in the Bahamas and in the Caribbean. Without Sirius we will be forced to resort to old fashioned analog short wave radio, with the squawks and crackles.
I don't use it for music, but it's irreplaceable for news and NPR. Next Tuesday I'll use it to listen to Obama's speech. Still haven't seen that man's face on TV, but I'm familiar with his voice on Sirius.
I can hardly claim that blue water sailors and cruise ships and others outside Internet/phone coverage are a significant market segment. Still, it would be a unlikely shame to see any segment of society forced to abandon digital technology for tired old analog stuff.
The Sirius/XM satellites will still be there even after bankrupcy. Perhaps a new owner could buy them for 1 cent on a dollar, wipe out the original share holders and bond holders, and make a profitable business out of keeping them operating.
p.s. I'm not at sea today. Otherwise I couldn't get Slashdot.
Months or years after TMI, the goverment NRC hacks admitted to a gross error. They estimated the rate of hydrogen production based on atmospheric pressure, whereas the pressure in the containment was significantly higher.
Bottom line, there was no bubble, and never any danger of creating a big bubble. Meanwhile, the radiation was contained.
Press reports of this "never mind" were buried in the back pages if printed at all, and hardly noticed by anyone.
The actual damage to public health and anxiety stress to individuals were caused by the publicity and misinformation from the federal government, not the reactor. TMI is a stunning illustration of the modern world in which perception, true of false, becomes the only reality that matters.
I am so sick of science writers who mess up the story because they don't understand the units of energy and power.
The article says the batteries store 7 megawatt hours. Fine.
Then it goes on to say "meaning the 20 batteries are capable of delivering roughly one megawatt of electricity almost instantaneously" WTF does that mean? Power, measured in megawatts is by definition an instantaneous unit. What's with "almost instantaneous". Also, the rate of discharge of a battery MW is unrelated to its storage capacity MWh, so the entire meaning of the sentence makes no sense.
Then the article says, "Over 100 megawatts of this technology [is] deployed throughout the world," Huh? Battery capacity is measured in megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
Then the article says, "costing roughly $3 million per megawatt" same thing. Battery cost must be proportional to megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
I suspect that their idea is to make a battery with 24 megawatt-hours of capacity able to deliver 1 megawatt of power uniformly for 24 hours, then say so.
Shame on Sciam writers and double shame on Sciam editors for not mastering such basic units in an article about energy.
How about a little economics. The article mentions two understandable numbers, an 11 MW wind plant, and 7 MWh of battery capacity. The combination of the two, allowing for wind variations during the day believably deliver 1 MW continuously to the grid. That's 24 MWh per day.
Now the batteries cost $3 million, and the wind generators cost $22 million. Total $25 million to deliver 1 MW of base load. That's $25 billion per GW.
The peak generating capacity of North America is about 750 GW. Let's say 250 GW when levelized to base load. Therefore, to supply 100% of that with wind and batteries would cost roughly $6.2 trillion dollars. Now Al Gore says, "No problem. We can do that in just 10 years." WTF is he thinking?
Even if we did spend $6.2 T, there will still be periods where not much wind blows for large regions for many weeks at a time. I live where it's cold, and I know that when it hits -30F, the wind is almost always still and the sky dark, and that it can stay like that for a couple of weeks. We therefore, need to double or triple the $6.2T plus more for transmission, to provide backup power sources, plus the means of delivering the energy over large distances.
Wind and solar are wonderful for up to 15-1-20% of the total grid generation and the cost of construction and operations dominate. More than that, and reliability and deliverability of the electric supply become dominant in the economic equation.
When I started writing code, memory cost $1 per bit, and programmers cost about $4 per hour. If you were writing a program that would be installed on many machines, you could afford very many man hours to save a bit or a byte here or there. It was precisely that misguided sense of economy that created spaghetti code and the worst programming practices ever.
I was personally responsible for a programming horror as a green youngster. I wrote a load-flow program for real time applications. I was given only 100K bytes budget for disk (drum) storage for code plus data plus saved results. To fit in that constraint I had to invent a 16 bit floating point number format. That made my application unusable and useless in the long run.
After the end of the project, I belatedly learned that all the other programmers routinely exceeded their memory constraints by 300-400%; and by doing so they managed to deliver something useful.
If you do lock down the laptops, what happens when a student buys it upon graduation?
If I were one of those students I would demand that upon purchase that you release all those locks and remove any monitoring or lockdown software without disturbing any of my personal files or settings.
Might that not be expensive and troublesome for the school?
An introductory course in programming does not have the purpose of teaching people how to program, or to learn good practices etc. It should help the students to decide whether or not programming is something they are interested in pursuing. Further, those students who decide not to go further, should walk away with some value that enriches their lives anyhow.
I've taught several introductory courses and I use VB as the vehicle. In only 3 hours of classroom work I can teach complete beginners how to create a rudimentary Pong game. The students squeal with delight when they see the results of their effort come alive.
Graphics and the motion are appealing to students. They are also the best way I know to teach students how something seemingly real can arise from such abstract things such as program statements. For this use, VB is the best tool I can imagine. Logo would be my second choice.
Using the Pong example, I've been able to teach many novices the central lesson of the course which is, "Programming is not magic. It is something that even I could understand and master if I so choose."
Students who choose not to go further lose much of their fear and incomprehension of things digital for the rest of their lives.
Students who do choose to go further can then go to a programming 101 course that picks a more appropriate language and concentrates on methods. Do not confuse programming 101 with introductory programming.
Unwettable fabric would not necessarily be a water barrier. It depends on the tightness of the weave.
What use for a coarse weave unwettable fabric? How about an inner liner for diapers? Fluid leaks out but the absorbant outer layer prevents it from leaking back in. It would even dry out the captured #2.
Any other slashdotter ideas for coarse weave unwettable?
Not entirely supply and demand. The salary also depends on the value that job description delivers to the enterprise, and also on how deep the pockets of the employer.
For positions like HR wank, the supply can be low and the demand high, but still one suspects that the enterprise is better off if he position remained unfilled. No high salary for that regardless of supply and demand.
How about child care workers at a day care center? They don't get much more than minimum wage despite qualifications and quality. The day care expense comes out of the shallow pockets of ordinary people; therefore they drive the wages down.
The point is that the human-oriented professions are paid less than tekkie jobs because of these kinds of bias.
I found a BIOwaste blog which very helpfully posted some more detailed and informative technical answers from the CEO of Geoplasma. Here's the meat:
1. Question: How much energy does the plasma-arc use? Answer: The plasma-arc facility uses approximately 40 megawatts of energy per hour. This is approximately one-quarter of the total output of hourly energy received from MSW.
2. Question: What will be the source of the plasma-arc energy? Answer: The facility will receive its energy from its total output. For St. Lucie, it is expected that the 3,000 tons of MSW processed per day will create 160 megawatts of energy per hour. As stated previously, 40 megawatts will be used to power the facility and the remaining 120 megawatts will be sold to an Electric Utility.
3. Question: What does the energy source emit? Answer: See question 5.
4. Question: Is the high heat of the plasma-arc being captured and utilized? Answer: Because of the nature of a closed-loop system the heat will be captured and utilized both in the plasma gasification process and later in the production of steam.
5. Question: How are they going to combust the syngas to keep the emissions low? Answer: There is no combustion during the gasification process. The Plasma-arc gasification process is a chemical reduction process that converts MSW from its original state to a glass-like aggregate solid at the bottom, and a synthetic fuel gas, also known as syngas, at the top.
Once gasification is over, the syngas is cleaned in a multi-step process, bringing it to levels near natural gas cleanliness. It is then compressed before being used as fuel for a gas turbine.
The gas turbine for this process is a modified natural gas turbine that mixes the cleaned syngas with air from the atmosphere, combusts the mixture and sends the hot gases through a turbine. The turbine spins an electric generator to produce electricity. The discharged hot gases are then passed through a heat recovery steam generator to produce more steam and to cool the hot gases. The cooler exhaust gases are then discharged into the atmosphere via a stack.
Emissions from this process are very similar to natural gas combined cycle plants which are considered to be âcleanâ(TM) and are located and permitted all over the U.S., and for that matter the whole world.
On NPR's Talk Of The Nation show last week, they had callers from all over the world give reactions to Obama's victory. I was shocked to hear Palestinians, Iranians and everyone be so totally knowledgeable about US internal politics. They talked about the Christian Right, neocons, and more. They sounded just like American media junkie citizens.
Then it dawned on me. Thanks to satellite TV, now the whole world can watch US TV news. They are influenced by media coverage just like US residents are.
Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one.
Maybe I'm not conspiratorial enough in my thinking. Have we allowed a self-appointed unregulated, unaccountable group of elites to take control of world opinion and thus overshadow the power of people and governments?
Is democracy a viable form of government if voter opinions are so readily influenced and shaped by the media?
Suddenly, I'm no longer so sure that absolute freedom of the press is such a good idea any more.
Consider my business -- wholesale electric power. The public goes to work at 8 and home at 5 on local time, not UTC.
Also, the customers expect daily billing, based on local days, not UTC days. Because of DST, those days may have 23, 24 or 25 hours. A 4% difference day-to-day. Nationally, about a billion dollars per day changes hands this way. Hardly negligible.
Here's the simple rule. When you deal with a process and physics and machines, UTC is fine. When you deal with people and with people's money, it is not fine.
How long must we continue this DST insanity? It doesn't accomplish anything beneficial. Nothing, nada, zip. If you like getting out of work in the light, then lobby to switch your state to a different time zone year round, but please please not DST.
On the other hand DST costs us plenty in confusion and lost work hours, and in maintaining software that deals with 24x7 matters. All such software must deal with one 23 hour day an one 25 hour day each year. Especially when said software integrates with external software and people it is next to impossible to assure error free transition to or from DST. Someone in the chain always drops the ball. One of these days, we're going to have an accidental missile launch or a nuclear meltdown or some really bad accident directly linked to DST.
One of the real lessons we should have learned from Y2K was that dealing with our insanely complex conventions for time and date are vastly expensive and the cause of chronic errors. New errors are still being created every day because the author deals incorrectly with time. DST just heaps on even more crap and returns no benefit.
Truly great code has logical coherence. It embodies a concept pure in conception and internally consistent in implementation.
To produce great code you need two things. First, you need inspiration. If you don't have that, then methodology doesn't matter. Second, you need to be able to transform the inspiration from the moment of conception to a complete, debugged, tested, and integrated deliverable in a single session. In that session your brain must hold the concept in its entirety without losing track of any details. That means an uninterrupted session of 20 hours plus or minus depending on your age.
Sorry, I can't find the link to the Hacker's Dictionary entry for this. It claimed that all truly great software was the result of giving up and restarting from scratch multiple times. Early iterations serve to teach you what the real requirements are. Also, your recent familiarity makes you much more productive in the second and third iterations. You may be able to produce 5 times more in the second iteration, and 10 times more in the third iteration because you're in the groove.
To be successful at iterations, the time elapsed between iterations has to be really short. Indeed, sometimes inspiration for iteration N+1 comes before N is finished. What they were trying to teach you in the hacker's wisdom was that if that happened, start over rather than trying to alter course.
Well times change. Today we deal with much larger, more complex, and more integrated applications than were typical in the 60s. ALso, development time is stretched over weeks and months, and rapid consecutive iterations are impossible. At the larger scale you are forced into reuse.
Still, there is no conflict of ideas. You can still strive for logical coherence and no-reuse policy at the module/object level, while applying re-use at higher levels. One of the great benefits of object-oriented design was to aid in limiting unintended consequences of complete replacement of the implementation of some objects.
The battle for e-voting has been lost. Just as many posts in this topic prove, the public is hyper sensitive and hyper suspicious of electronic voting. They aren't going to trust it no matter what. It matters not whether or not their fears are justified.
We should return to paper ballots. They are the only voting method that might be accepted.
I happen to believe that paper balloting is much more subject to actual fraud and abuse than any other method. There are centuries of history in finding creative ways to cheat on paper ballots. Still, actual fraud is irrelevant, only public confidence matters.
My preferred solution would require a constitutional amendment. Prior to an election, the authorities would declare a target margin of error. Say 5%. The margin would account for fraud, abuse, errors, miscounts, whatever. The winner would have to win a plurality with a margin greater than 5% over the second place candidate. If the results are closer than 5%, the election is declared a tie and a whole new election would be required. Sure, that might result in revote after revote after revote, but not an infinite series.
If the point is commercial success, then we don't need to convince geeks or slashdotters that it is secure, we have to convince Aunt Milly that she should use it.
Aunt Milly will not be impressed with technology, nor by fancy words like quantum, nor by the impressive names of the vendor companies, nor by the endorsements of accrediting bodies she never heard of.
I think that Aunt Milli will never buy and use encryption unless she is told by her parish priest, or by the likes of Oprah Winfrey or Ed McMahon that she should buy it, trust it and use it.
We don't need technology, we need celebrity endorsements.
Slashdot Mirror
The WSJ article was apparently triggered by a letter sent by NERC (North American Electric Reliability Council) to its members. I think it shows a healthy development of security digging down to yet another layer of depth.
Forget the major computers in the major control centers. That's what everyone thinks of first. At that level it is becoming like the Indians and athropologists in the Grand Canyon. For every utility cyber worker there seems to be 30 government gumshoes and overseers looking over their shoulders. One would expect no aspects of security to be neglected at that level.
The NERC letter refers to devices at a lower level. Primarily, what the industry calls "protective relays" in substations. From 1888 to a few years ago these functions were really done with electromechanical relays. Now, many of them have been replaced by digital equivalents on a one-by-one basis. In a household analogy, it is like the difference between a central electric control computer for the house, as compared to a "smart" digital LED light bulb. One worries about the central computer being hacked, but at first blush, not the light bulb.
The problem is that the engineers who deal with this level of equipment aren't used to thinking of these devices like the light bulb instead of like computers in a network. They have not identified many of these low-level devices as "cyber critical". The NERC letter urges utilities to change that culture.
This is an industry that owns and maintains hundreds of millions of diverse pieces of equipment. Every day, some fraction of them are converted to digital. No single study, no single policy can change this infrastructure overnight. I think they are approaching cybersecurity thoroughly and methodically, but it will take time.
Remember Y2K? Roughly the same collection of hundreds of millions of devices were threatened by a common-mode failure (Y2K). It was very analogous to an external cyber attack. The utility industry tackled Y2K, thoroughly reviewed all those devices, and performed flawlessly on the morning of 1/1/2000.
My point? Sure we should worry about cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, but don't jump to the conclusion that no security exists or that nothing competent is being done about it.
I used to work in the nuclear power plant operator training industry. Believe me, whatever else those operators were, they were not cheap. The CEO could not skimp on salaries and hire idiots. In fact, in a time when $40K was an excellent salary, the training costs per operator was more than $1 million.
On the other hand, there were cultural obstacles. In Europe (Sweden), they hired engineers with masters degrees to become nuclear plant operators. In the USA, they were mostly high school grads who were union members and promoted from running older coal plants. Union politics, not merit decided who got promoted. They were not the best and brightest. Of course in Sweden they also attract the best and brightest to be civil servants. Can you imagine that happening here?
There are always plenty of suggestions as to where society should apply its best and brightest. It is much harder to place the worst and dumbest. Consider the bottom 25%. They have to have jobs. No matter where you assign them, the public will in some way be depending on those jobs being done well. So filling jobs becomes less of a question of rational allocation of resources, but more a matter of attractiveness and recruiting.
A plant operator must stand there and do nothing but monitor year after year, yet react swiftly and accurately in those rare seconds of pure terror, and then have the whole world second guess how well they did it. In addition, they have to do shift work for 24x7 operation. Most people think that it is a hell of an unattractive job. I think that the plant owners do a hell of a job trying to find and retain the best people they can get, and to enrich the jobs to make them less boring. It takes much more than deep pockets to succeed.
So you tell me. You play CEO and tell me how would you convince Google engineers to quit Google and become operators, and how many of the lower quartiles you would assign to invent Google. Convince those bright college students that they don't want to be environmental scientists, but nuclear power plant operators instead.
I also read that Medicare costs four times as much per patient in Miami than in LA. In Miami, doctors are scheduling Medicare patients for monthly MRI scans just on general preventative principles.
My point is that huge battles await government when it tries to truly reign in wasteful health care spending. Both the doctors and the patients will fight like hell, not to mention drug companies, and clinics. Congressmen on the other hand are cowards when it comes to bucking public passion.
I, for one, have little faith in our government's ability to manage such challenges. I think it will fail.
I don't think most judges would be amused to spend the court's time to decide such a case and they may toss it on the basis of De minimis non curat rex.
By the way, when researching this I found the following on the first page of the Copyright Offices FAQ list. "How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?" That itself is less than 130 characters. I think I'll go tweet "My sighting of Elvis."
Oh wow. I was one of the enthusiastic fans of Muse Software's Robot Wars for the Apple ][. It sounds to me like Soulskill has invented a way to re-create Robot Wars in a more real and more fun way.
Here's a description of the original game.
Create code for a robot using the provided programing language, limited to 256 lines of code. Test your robot on the test bench by examining the code line by line and determining whether the bot performs as intended. Then put your finished robot in the arena with up to four other bots, set the number of battles, and watch them fight it out in a top-down view. Computer Gaming world had annual contests for several years in which readers could send their bots on disk to participate in the match, with results and prizes reported in the magazine.
You won't be able to win this with the money argument. Microsoft will swarm all over you, giving free stuff away. They have a fund just to give away free licenses to anyone who's even thinking about trying open source.
Well then it's a win-win situation isn't it? If Microsoft cuts their license fees, then he will have saved money for the university. I would not call that losing the argument.
Every day we read about cell phones, MP3 players, game boxes, and even set-top boxes taking over and making PCs obsolete and irrelevant.
Microsoft was a monopolist only in the narrowly defined PC market. In the new-age market with non PC boxes included, Microsoft's share is small and growing still smaller every day.
If I were M's lawyer, I would judge that now is the time to make the argument that M's monopoly power is a thing of the past and that all EU and US restrictions should be dropped.
I don't buy that; not when the remedy is to expose all patient's information excessively to ease processing of a few trouble cases.
I believe that the health care industry is much more concerned with making their own jobs easier than they are about patient privacy.
Sure there can be issues with coverage, preferences and the like, but putting patient privacy at the bottom of the priority list sucks. Each patient should have the right to determine his own priorities regarding efficacy of treatment and payment versus privacy. The way the laws and E-commerce practices are going, they preclude such a right -- they force everyone into a one-solution-fits-all where third parties decided in advance what is in the patient's best interest.
Don't think that there aren't abuses associated with the process either. For example, drug companies gather info from pharmacies to gather stats on which drugs the doctors prescribe how often. They use those stats to target marketing efforts to convince the doctors to prescribe their brand more often. In what way is that unequivocally in the patient's best interest?
Lawyers in civil cases like car accidents can dig for and get info that a patient may have bought Prozac at some time in his/her life. They use that info to blackmail plaintiffs into dropping lawsuits or as evidence to a jury that the plaintiff is mentally unstable. Judges fail to rein in the discovery process to prevent such abuses.
We need to turn the approach to privacy on its head. Patients need the right to demand control on how their information is handled, and to put the burden of proof on the side of those who would expose the data. They need the ability to make their medical info out of reach of subpoena.
It is true most people don't give a damn about privacy, but that is insufficient reason to deny everybody the right to the degree of privacy they want.
As things stand today under HIPPA, patients either accept the government's rules or they abstain from medical treatment; even if they paid for it in advance. Abstinence is the only opt-out available in the USA -- that really sucks.
In the 1980s, a Scientific American article by David Chaum, and an article from Germany on electronic prescriptions (sorry, no links, it predated the web), educate me about the possibility of electronically secured prescriptions.
Basically, by creative use of encryption, it is possible to create an electronic prescription that
(1) lets the pharmacy know that the prescription is authorized, and how it is paid for without revealing the name of the patient or the doctor. (2) similarly allow the insurer, the patient, the doctor and government, access to information they are authorized to have without disclosing anything more.
The same can be applied in all areas involving privacy and access to electronic records. Encryption can be used to actively limit access to authorized purposes without depending on the lack of human error.
Isn't is about time that we started using technology in these creative ways to achieve privacy levels as high as technology allows? How about an open source effort to publish papers and algorithmic examples showing how this can be done in an attempt to influence policy?
I'm a blue water sailor. I use Sirius off shore and in the Bahamas and in the Caribbean. Without Sirius we will be forced to resort to old fashioned analog short wave radio, with the squawks and crackles.
I don't use it for music, but it's irreplaceable for news and NPR. Next Tuesday I'll use it to listen to Obama's speech. Still haven't seen that man's face on TV, but I'm familiar with his voice on Sirius.
I can hardly claim that blue water sailors and cruise ships and others outside Internet/phone coverage are a significant market segment. Still, it would be a unlikely shame to see any segment of society forced to abandon digital technology for tired old analog stuff.
The Sirius/XM satellites will still be there even after bankrupcy. Perhaps a new owner could buy them for 1 cent on a dollar, wipe out the original share holders and bond holders, and make a profitable business out of keeping them operating.
p.s. I'm not at sea today. Otherwise I couldn't get Slashdot.
Months or years after TMI, the goverment NRC hacks admitted to a gross error. They estimated the rate of hydrogen production based on atmospheric pressure, whereas the pressure in the containment was significantly higher.
Bottom line, there was no bubble, and never any danger of creating a big bubble. Meanwhile, the radiation was contained.
Press reports of this "never mind" were buried in the back pages if printed at all, and hardly noticed by anyone.
The actual damage to public health and anxiety stress to individuals were caused by the publicity and misinformation from the federal government, not the reactor. TMI is a stunning illustration of the modern world in which perception, true of false, becomes the only reality that matters.
I am so sick of science writers who mess up the story because they don't understand the units of energy and power.
The article says the batteries store 7 megawatt hours. Fine.
Then it goes on to say "meaning the 20 batteries are capable of delivering roughly one megawatt of electricity almost instantaneously" WTF does that mean? Power, measured in megawatts is by definition an instantaneous unit. What's with "almost instantaneous". Also, the rate of discharge of a battery MW is unrelated to its storage capacity MWh, so the entire meaning of the sentence makes no sense.
Then the article says, "Over 100 megawatts of this technology [is] deployed throughout the world," Huh? Battery capacity is measured in megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
Then the article says, "costing roughly $3 million per megawatt" same thing. Battery cost must be proportional to megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
I suspect that their idea is to make a battery with 24 megawatt-hours of capacity able to deliver 1 megawatt of power uniformly for 24 hours, then say so.
Shame on Sciam writers and double shame on Sciam editors for not mastering such basic units in an article about energy.
How about a little economics. The article mentions two understandable numbers, an 11 MW wind plant, and 7 MWh of battery capacity. The combination of the two, allowing for wind variations during the day believably deliver 1 MW continuously to the grid. That's 24 MWh per day.
Now the batteries cost $3 million, and the wind generators cost $22 million. Total $25 million to deliver 1 MW of base load. That's $25 billion per GW.
The peak generating capacity of North America is about 750 GW. Let's say 250 GW when levelized to base load. Therefore, to supply 100% of that with wind and batteries would cost roughly $6.2 trillion dollars. Now Al Gore says, "No problem. We can do that in just 10 years." WTF is he thinking?
Even if we did spend $6.2 T, there will still be periods where not much wind blows for large regions for many weeks at a time. I live where it's cold, and I know that when it hits -30F, the wind is almost always still and the sky dark, and that it can stay like that for a couple of weeks. We therefore, need to double or triple the $6.2T plus more for transmission, to provide backup power sources, plus the means of delivering the energy over large distances.
Wind and solar are wonderful for up to 15-1-20% of the total grid generation and the cost of construction and operations dominate. More than that, and reliability and deliverability of the electric supply become dominant in the economic equation.
Yes we learned that lesson generations ago.
When I started writing code, memory cost $1 per bit, and programmers cost about $4 per hour. If you were writing a program that would be installed on many machines, you could afford very many man hours to save a bit or a byte here or there. It was precisely that misguided sense of economy that created spaghetti code and the worst programming practices ever.
I was personally responsible for a programming horror as a green youngster. I wrote a load-flow program for real time applications. I was given only 100K bytes budget for disk (drum) storage for code plus data plus saved results. To fit in that constraint I had to invent a 16 bit floating point number format. That made my application unusable and useless in the long run.
After the end of the project, I belatedly learned that all the other programmers routinely exceeded their memory constraints by 300-400%; and by doing so they managed to deliver something useful.
If you do lock down the laptops, what happens when a student buys it upon graduation?
If I were one of those students I would demand that upon purchase that you release all those locks and remove any monitoring or lockdown software without disturbing any of my personal files or settings.
Might that not be expensive and troublesome for the school?
I disagree, and I'll tell you why.
An introductory course in programming does not have the purpose of teaching people how to program, or to learn good practices etc. It should help the students to decide whether or not programming is something they are interested in pursuing. Further, those students who decide not to go further, should walk away with some value that enriches their lives anyhow.
I've taught several introductory courses and I use VB as the vehicle. In only 3 hours of classroom work I can teach complete beginners how to create a rudimentary Pong game. The students squeal with delight when they see the results of their effort come alive.
Graphics and the motion are appealing to students. They are also the best way I know to teach students how something seemingly real can arise from such abstract things such as program statements. For this use, VB is the best tool I can imagine. Logo would be my second choice.
Using the Pong example, I've been able to teach many novices the central lesson of the course which is, "Programming is not magic. It is something that even I could understand and master if I so choose."
Students who choose not to go further lose much of their fear and incomprehension of things digital for the rest of their lives.
Students who do choose to go further can then go to a programming 101 course that picks a more appropriate language and concentrates on methods. Do not confuse programming 101 with introductory programming.
The secret is out. From now on, if you ever commit a crime in Illinois within range of a surveillance camera, be sure to smile as you do it.
Unwettable fabric would not necessarily be a water barrier. It depends on the tightness of the weave.
What use for a coarse weave unwettable fabric? How about an inner liner for diapers? Fluid leaks out but the absorbant outer layer prevents it from leaking back in. It would even dry out the captured #2.
Any other slashdotter ideas for coarse weave unwettable?
Not entirely supply and demand. The salary also depends on the value that job description delivers to the enterprise, and also on how deep the pockets of the employer.
For positions like HR wank, the supply can be low and the demand high, but still one suspects that the enterprise is better off if he position remained unfilled. No high salary for that regardless of supply and demand.
How about child care workers at a day care center? They don't get much more than minimum wage despite qualifications and quality. The day care expense comes out of the shallow pockets of ordinary people; therefore they drive the wages down.
The point is that the human-oriented professions are paid less than tekkie jobs because of these kinds of bias.
I found a BIOwaste blog which very helpfully posted some more detailed and informative technical answers from the CEO of Geoplasma. Here's the meat:
1. Question: How much energy does the plasma-arc use?
Answer: The plasma-arc facility uses approximately 40 megawatts of energy per hour. This is approximately one-quarter of the total output of hourly energy received from MSW.
2. Question: What will be the source of the plasma-arc energy?
Answer: The facility will receive its energy from its total output. For St. Lucie, it is expected that the 3,000 tons of MSW processed per day will create 160 megawatts of energy per hour. As stated previously, 40 megawatts will be used to power the facility and the remaining 120 megawatts will be sold to an Electric Utility.
3. Question: What does the energy source emit?
Answer: See question 5.
4. Question: Is the high heat of the plasma-arc being captured and utilized?
Answer: Because of the nature of a closed-loop system the heat will be captured and utilized both in the plasma gasification process and later in the production of steam.
5. Question: How are they going to combust the syngas to keep the emissions low?
Answer: There is no combustion during the gasification process. The Plasma-arc gasification process is a chemical reduction process that converts MSW from its original state to a glass-like aggregate solid at the bottom, and a synthetic fuel gas, also known as syngas, at the top.
Once gasification is over, the syngas is cleaned in a multi-step process, bringing it to levels near natural gas cleanliness. It is then compressed before being used as fuel for a gas turbine.
The gas turbine for this process is a modified natural gas turbine that mixes the cleaned syngas with air from the atmosphere, combusts the mixture and sends the hot gases through a turbine. The turbine spins an electric generator to produce electricity. The discharged hot gases are then passed through a heat recovery steam generator to produce more steam and to cool the hot gases. The cooler exhaust gases are then discharged into the atmosphere via a stack.
Emissions from this process are very similar to natural gas combined cycle plants which are considered to be âcleanâ(TM) and are located and permitted all over the U.S., and for that matter the whole world.
On NPR's Talk Of The Nation show last week, they had callers from all over the world give reactions to Obama's victory. I was shocked to hear Palestinians, Iranians and everyone be so totally knowledgeable about US internal politics. They talked about the Christian Right, neocons, and more. They sounded just like American media junkie citizens.
Then it dawned on me. Thanks to satellite TV, now the whole world can watch US TV news. They are influenced by media coverage just like US residents are.
Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one.
Maybe I'm not conspiratorial enough in my thinking. Have we allowed a self-appointed unregulated, unaccountable group of elites to take control of world opinion and thus overshadow the power of people and governments?
Is democracy a viable form of government if voter opinions are so readily influenced and shaped by the media?
Suddenly, I'm no longer so sure that absolute freedom of the press is such a good idea any more.
Consider my business -- wholesale electric power. The public goes to work at 8 and home at 5 on local time, not UTC.
Also, the customers expect daily billing, based on local days, not UTC days. Because of DST, those days may have 23, 24 or 25 hours. A 4% difference day-to-day. Nationally, about a billion dollars per day changes hands this way. Hardly negligible.
Here's the simple rule. When you deal with a process and physics and machines, UTC is fine. When you deal with people and with people's money, it is not fine.
How long must we continue this DST insanity? It doesn't accomplish anything beneficial. Nothing, nada, zip. If you like getting out of work in the light, then lobby to switch your state to a different time zone year round, but please please not DST.
On the other hand DST costs us plenty in confusion and lost work hours, and in maintaining software that deals with 24x7 matters. All such software must deal with one 23 hour day an one 25 hour day each year. Especially when said software integrates with external software and people it is next to impossible to assure error free transition to or from DST. Someone in the chain always drops the ball. One of these days, we're going to have an accidental missile launch or a nuclear meltdown or some really bad accident directly linked to DST.
One of the real lessons we should have learned from Y2K was that dealing with our insanely complex conventions for time and date are vastly expensive and the cause of chronic errors. New errors are still being created every day because the author deals incorrectly with time. DST just heaps on even more crap and returns no benefit.
Truly great code has logical coherence. It embodies a concept pure in conception and internally consistent in implementation.
To produce great code you need two things. First, you need inspiration. If you don't have that, then methodology doesn't matter. Second, you need to be able to transform the inspiration from the moment of conception to a complete, debugged, tested, and integrated deliverable in a single session. In that session your brain must hold the concept in its entirety without losing track of any details. That means an uninterrupted session of 20 hours plus or minus depending on your age.
Sorry, I can't find the link to the Hacker's Dictionary entry for this. It claimed that all truly great software was the result of giving up and restarting from scratch multiple times. Early iterations serve to teach you what the real requirements are. Also, your recent familiarity makes you much more productive in the second and third iterations. You may be able to produce 5 times more in the second iteration, and 10 times more in the third iteration because you're in the groove.
To be successful at iterations, the time elapsed between iterations has to be really short. Indeed, sometimes inspiration for iteration N+1 comes before N is finished. What they were trying to teach you in the hacker's wisdom was that if that happened, start over rather than trying to alter course.
Well times change. Today we deal with much larger, more complex, and more integrated applications than were typical in the 60s. ALso, development time is stretched over weeks and months, and rapid consecutive iterations are impossible. At the larger scale you are forced into reuse.
Still, there is no conflict of ideas. You can still strive for logical coherence and no-reuse policy at the module/object level, while applying re-use at higher levels. One of the great benefits of object-oriented design was to aid in limiting unintended consequences of complete replacement of the implementation of some objects.
The battle for e-voting has been lost. Just as many posts in this topic prove, the public is hyper sensitive and hyper suspicious of electronic voting. They aren't going to trust it no matter what. It matters not whether or not their fears are justified.
We should return to paper ballots. They are the only voting method that might be accepted.
I happen to believe that paper balloting is much more subject to actual fraud and abuse than any other method. There are centuries of history in finding creative ways to cheat on paper ballots. Still, actual fraud is irrelevant, only public confidence matters.
My preferred solution would require a constitutional amendment. Prior to an election, the authorities would declare a target margin of error. Say 5%. The margin would account for fraud, abuse, errors, miscounts, whatever. The winner would have to win a plurality with a margin greater than 5% over the second place candidate. If the results are closer than 5%, the election is declared a tie and a whole new election would be required. Sure, that might result in revote after revote after revote, but not an infinite series.
If the point is commercial success, then we don't need to convince geeks or slashdotters that it is secure, we have to convince Aunt Milly that she should use it.
Aunt Milly will not be impressed with technology, nor by fancy words like quantum, nor by the impressive names of the vendor companies, nor by the endorsements of accrediting bodies she never heard of.
I think that Aunt Milli will never buy and use encryption unless she is told by her parish priest, or by the likes of Oprah Winfrey or Ed McMahon that she should buy it, trust it and use it.
We don't need technology, we need celebrity endorsements.