Whereas you have what amounts to structured wiring in a telco CO you have shared media in the cable environment. And, the router actually terminates the cable (think a Cisco 7246). So there's a lot less hardware.
So you split the bandwidth at the head end of the cable, or you allocate a second channel for the competitor's service and put another RF modem at the head end. This is close to trivial.
So what are we talking about here? Allocating frequencies on the cable? There are only so many. How do you decide who gets one?
ISTR a case not long ago where a competitor to a cable company tried to rent one of the un-used channels to provide a competitive cable-modem service. The cable company refused, and the courts agreed that the cable company could not be forced to rent its own lines to a competitor; there was no technical reason it could not have been done, only regulatory barriers to doing it.
I think the solution is to divest both the phone and cable companies of their wires, and divide them into carriers and service providers. If the company that owns and maintains the wires has no interest in the services being delivered, they are in no position to discriminate against any comers because they're all paying the same rate anyway.
Will different densities affect how the neutrinos travel (making aiming a difficulty)? Or is that pretty much what they're depending on?
I'm no particle physicist, but I believe that density, period (density times distance) is the objective of the long-baseline beam project. Neutrinos can travel through millions of miles of matter like light through glass; they are very hard to scatter because they interact so weakly. On the other hand, it appears that interactions which change the neutrino's flavor without scattering it are much more likely, which is why our early detectors only found 1/3 of the neutrinos we'd expect the Sun to emit from its rate of fusion. (When protons are converted to neutrons, charge and parity are conserved by the emission of a positron and a neutrino; a lot of these electron neutrinos apparently switch flavors to mu and tau neutrinos on their way out of the core.)
And if they miss? They won't be seeing any neutrinos coming from the source accelerator. If they aimed at you, you'd never notice any more than you notice the millions of solar neutrinos streaking through your body every second like ghost bullets from an etherial machine gun. Hey, they don't even slime you...
The collisions of protons with targets don't make neutrinos, they make pions. Charged pions can be directed magnetically; when they decay to muons, they create neutrinos and when the muons decay to electrons they create still more neutrinos. If the kinetic energy of the decay is small compared to the energy of the original beam, the neutrinos will be travelling in more or less the same direction as the parent particles.
Antivirus programs are always out of date by hours if not longer. If you are hit between the time a virus goes into the wild and the time the update is finally ready and installed, you're hosed. The only solution for safety-critical systems is to have a secure wall between programs and data which cannot be breached by viruses or worms arriving from outside on their own, and preferably not without intervention from a qualified service person (fooling a user is one thing, fooling an expert is something else).
This probably means that critical systems on things like ships should not be running any flavor of Windows, nor maybe Linux either. There are a bunch of OS's made for embedded systems, and due to their small size and simplicity they are much smaller, probably faster, and certainly less vulnerable or even completely invulnerable to this kind of attack. If your requirements are that stringent, that's what you should be using.
it seems to me that since carbon nanotubes are, well, pure carbon that pollution is a non-issue.
Diesel soot is nearly pure carbon, but the PM10 class of particles into which the finest soot falls is strongly associated with hospital admissions from respiratory problems, as well as spikes in deaths. 500-nanometer (.5 micron) nanotubes sound like they're right in the size range where they'd be a serious threat.
Somehow I don't think that a solid block or sheet of polymer presents anything like the same threat from the battery being broken open.
Instead of buying clips, try sticking the suction cups to the board with clear silicone RTV sealant. It will still peel off, but only when you want it to (it takes considerable effort).
I think we can take it for granted that we'll find easy ways of making carbon nanotubes in ton quantities. But their usefulness for making batteries depends on other factors:
How many cycles can they take before they have degraded by, say, 50%?
How difficult are they to recycle or destroy?
If they are released into the environment, do they pose a pollution hazard akin to the fine asbestos fibers which are known to cause lung disease?
None of those things were covered in the article, and they'd be very nice to know. If the nanotubes don't offer as good a lifespan as the proton polymer battery, or you'd have a health hazard if the fibers were dispersed, these things are not going to be the panacea they appear from the article.
The FBI spoksmen claimed that the bugs caught the phrase "The fire has started." or "The fires have started." Given that Koresh had been teaching for quite some time (before the siege) that satanic forces in control of the government would burn them out, such a sentence is hardly proof that they started the fires themselves.
They also caught the Davidians talking about "needing more fuel" before the fires broke out. Accelerant, in arson-investigator-speak.
If you have other evidence please post it, with a pointer or link to somewhere that it appears in the public record.
The recordings themselves, including the people talking about fuel, were broadcast as part of the Frontline documentary on Waco.
Just because the Branch Davidians were horribly mistreated, persecuted and some of them murdrered by the US government does not mean that the majority of them were not suicides. It gave them reason to kill themselves, to avoid the abuse the were certain would come (and lose their salvation). Claiming that the US government actually committed the crime of arson is weak and diverts attention from the crimes which are undeniable... and very successfully.
There are recordings from bugs in the compound (built into the cartons of milk given to the Davidians) which prove that the fires were deliberately set by the Davidians themselves.
ISTR that the one incendiary-type gas canister found on the premises was fired hours before the fire broke out. And on top of this, many of the dead were found shot to death (including Koresh himself).
While you won't have any trouble showing that the tactics of the government were ridiculous (if they wanted Koresh they could have arrested him when he went into town, alone), there is nothing to support the case that the tear gas caused the fires. The evidence proves that the Davidians committed suicide, as their apocalyptic theology demanded that they die; the government's stupidity was in pushing them in ways all but guaranteed to make them do it.
The risk of making a big chuck of Chicago uninhabitable and making a lot of people sick had their reactor caught on fire was very real.
No, it wasn't. The squash-court reactor operated with people standing on it; it did not generate enough direct energy to make people sick from direct exposure, let alone radioactive byproducts to make anyone sick at a distance.
Accidents do happen. And it's very hard to clean up.
Contrast and compare to poly-chlorinated biphenyls, a chemical (not radiological) toxin. Now those things are everywhere, and nobody has any suggestions for cleaning them out of the general environment.
South Africa, I belive, is in the process of building a "pebble bed" reactor which should be quite safe compared to the reactor designs used currently. It is claimed to be meltdown-proof, and the fuel should always stay contained inside of the "pebbles" reducing the risk of contamination.
The real risk of pebble beds is sabotage/terrorism. The S. Africans are claiming that such a reactor would not require a containment building, which in the post-9/11/2001 world is laughable. A pressure-vessel breach with the reactor at operating temperature would expose a lot of graphite pellets to air, resulting in a radioactive Hibachi a la Chernobyl (I don't know if an incombustible pellet coating such as silicon nitride would be sufficiently rugged to prevent this scenario). OTOH, the pebble-bed is immune to meltdown, so burying it under enough dirt to keep it from being hit by Boeing or Airbus cruise missiles should be sufficient protection.
Pebble manufacture is probably the smallest problem. If your graphite moderator is sufficiently pure, you can use natural uranium and you have no enrichment or other steps and no byproducts. Yellowcake (uranium dioxide) is probably one of the least-difficult materials to work with; it's been used as a colorant in pottery glazes.
Supply of workers. If you go to Nowheresville because rent is cheap (because there is no existing high-tech to drive up prices), you are going to find that there aren't any high-tech people there to hire. You are going to have to hire them from elsewhere, and you are going to have to pay BIG relocation bonuses. Then you have the problem of hiring people who are going to look at the locale and see that moving there gives them absolutely zero options if they decide they don't like working for you. The result is that you are not going to get many takers unless you spend a lot of money. Poof! go your savings.
It's probably going to be a lot easier for companies to move a relatively short distance, like SF to Sacramento. This gives the workers a lot more options if they decide to reconsider in the short term, and the influx of high-tech companies means that the deficit of employment options is going down rapidly.
If you're going to charge by the page-view, you are going to have to radically increase the granularity of the options on e.g. story selections. If a story has 327 responses, there is no way that I am going to pay for a page-view just so that I can change the threshold to something which pares it down to something I can actually read (not to mention, it wastes your bandwidth for something I am not going to read). That's unfair to me, the reader; I am going to be angry with you for foisting the crap off on me and making me pay for it. I will run Junkbuster rather than participate in a system which forces me to pay for things I don't want just to get to what I do want.
I also think I ought to be able to get credit for what I post. People who are reading the comments are reading for the comments, especially for the highly-rated comments; they are your bread and butter. If I am contributing to your bottom line I ought to be given some kind of credit for it. I don't even read comments on ZDNet any more because their system refuses to let me read comfortably (piles of ads and links on every response), and if Slashdot becomes as hostile to good posters as ZDNet is to readers, there will be no point in trying to contribute here any more.
And don't you dare count moderation or meta-moderation work against page-views! You won't have anyone left who's worth a damn.
Very simply, you can't screen for most human traits. Period. Sorry, go to the back of the line.
Yet. The number of tests is going up rapidly.
The real difficulty you're going to have is that the number of usable gametes you're going to get falls exponentially with the number of chromosomes you're trying to select for. After you get to four or five traits you've got a choice: either you're going to have to be able to pick individual chromosomes and build custom nuclei, or you're going to have to select a "best-of-N" instead of a pure optimum. The "best-of-N" preserves large elements of chance.
Besides the fact that most traits are caused not by one gene, but by the interaction of dozens of genes and the proteins they create, you have to consider that almost all human traits develop in accordance to someone's environment.
This is still not bad. If it gives parents a shot at having a child who'll do best in their environment, or allows parents the knowledge that their child will do best if they provide a certain environment, it's all for the better. The same tests which show what environmental influences are best will help children who aren't specifically selected for certain traits to get the best out of what they've got. This is coming whether you want it or not; the technology is essential to tell what drugs will benefit individuals and what side effects they might have, and the other knowledge will follow behind it. Soon we are going to have the knowledge once reserved to deities, whether we want it or not; we had better be prepared to act on it humanely.
Something funky with the article
on
Pilot of My Soul
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· Score: 1
I'd love to read it, but when I click on the link I get a page with no article text.
education is believing what you are told. What we need is for people to think, think, think
Think about what? To understand even the basics of many of these issues, people need to be grounded in:
Physics
Chemistry
Thermodynamics (why you can't get something for nothing)
Instead, a lot of people's "thinking" involves conspiracy theories about what interests are behind some nefarious plot or other. There is a huge amount of nonsense from the left about hydrogen power (from people who barely know that hydrogen is part of water, don't know that hydrogen is 11% of water by mass, and couldn't tell you where the energy for their hydrogen economy would come from if their lives depended on it) and an equal amount from the right about greenhouse gases and ozone depletion (from people who have no clue about the difference between atomic chlorine and chloride ion, and why the chemistry or atmospheric lifetime would be different). Reason requires knowledge of the facts beneath the conclusion, and learning those facts (education) is mandatory, not optional. You can't think if you have nothing to think with.
This is the strongest argument I know for demanding that all 4-year college degrees require basic science, chemistry and mathematics. Too much basic citizenship has come to rely on it, and the point of college isn't supposed to be to turn out drones (or ideological infantry) but well-rounded citizens.
The reason so many "scientists" come up with false data is because they don't apply common sense, impartial observation, or healthy skepticism.
Scientists aren't always practicing science. What else is new?
Yes, it can. Even if it was only $$ it would still have an impact on human suffering.
Oh, you mean like the impact from using fluorescent lights instead of incandescents? (Pays for itself many times over.) Or you could give up paying a huge premium for a fashionable SUV, and save a bunch of fuel in the bargain. Build your house with good insulation, overhangs to shield the windows from summer sun, and other features which cost a few bucks, then enjoy radically reduced energy costs for the life of the building (possibly a century).
A lot of "greenie" measures make a huge amount of sense if you use basic economic analysis. The problem is that lots of people don't bother because they apply one set of measures to "normal" expenses like a house, but demand a much greater payback from environmental improvements. People will often demand that an environmental measure pay its cost in a year or less, which is insane when the lifespan of the improvement can be 20 years or more. Such things should be evaluated on the basis of long-term capital expenditures, standard mortgage rates, and other cornerstones of economic payback analysis. (The problem is that most people have no idea how to do even the most basic analysis, so they will stick money in a savings account earning a taxable 2% a year when they could buy some CF bulbs and be earning 25% per year tax-free on the same money.)
Greenies are certainly well-meaning, if sometimes undiscerning. Unfortunately, their irrational attitude and lack of scientific training often make them easy to manipulate.
The anti-"greenies"(what a condescending label) have even less scientific training, which is why the corporate propaganda mills have so much trouble finding reputable scientists to spread their FUD.
Which is why it is incumbent upon people who want a sane outcome, regardless of what side they're on, to correct the errors and condemn the lies (and liars) regardless of where they are found. And educate, educate, educate! There's a reason I spend lots of time correcting erroneous postings about e.g. nuclear power, and that's because I don't want to see important decisions made based on someone's reading of a polemic designed to get them all fired up while keeping them ignorant. This serves no one except the ideologues, who have nobody's interests in mind except their own parochial agendas.
Do recycle aluminum, however; the same process used to refine aluminum ore is used to recycle aluminum cans--it just take a lot less energy, which reduces the cost of producing aluminum, and less power means less emissions from electric power plants.
False. The production of aluminum from bauxite requires dissolving it in molten cryolite and electrolytic reduction to aluminum metal. The recycling of metallic aluminum requires only melting and forming it, which has nothing to do with the process of aluminum production, and almost never occurs in the same plant.
One says that the burn will be fast and explosive, blowing all the rest of the new, degenerate and normal matter off of the surface.
Where'd that theory come from? I've been reading about neutron stars for some time and I've seen this as an explanation for X-ray bursters (the ignition of the accumulated hydrogen makes the surface extremely hot for a while, then it cools), but the star does not lose matter; the energy of fusing hydrogen is not sufficient to overcome the gravity of a neutron star.
That sounds more like a certain theory for the collapse of white dwarfs under infalling matter. Supposedly this would always happen at the same mass and produce uniformly bright supernovae.
So, does anybody out there know enough about astrophysics to know how close this thing would be to becoming a black hole?
Nothing in the article hinted at that.
THAT would be a cool process to watch.
... from a safe distance of several light-years (mind the neutrinos, they don't care about shielding).
This pulsar is in a globular cluster, which probably contains a number of other neutron stars already. Sooner or later two of them are going to make close passes and get captured into a mutual orbit, which will then decay. When the two neutron stars merge they will likely collapse catastrophically into a black hole, with the added excitement of kilohertz gravitational waves thrown in.
The water shield is okay for stopping solar flare protons. The problem is that the water creates more radiation from cosmic-ray particles than it stops; the secondary particles will kill you. You either want as little mass as possible between you and the outside (to prevent cosmic rays from creating secondary particles) or at least ten tons per square meter to stop everything.
Thing is, for a cycler that's doing its orbital corrections with something like a solar sail, I don't see why you can't have ten tons per square meter. It would let crews ride the cyclers indefinitely, instead of being limited to one or two spins in a lifetime.
My question is, why is this meme back in the public consciousness NOW?
Maybe it's because the 33rd anniversary of the first Moon landing is coming up? Or maybe that's how long it takes to get the news media to pay attention to an idea about space. Or maybe a reporter thought this was a gosh-wow neat idea because he'd never heard of it before (because he never bothered studying space, as most reporters don't) so he thought it would make a good article for his equally-ignorant readership. Whatever it is, it's pathetic.
Second question, where did the sudden push for NASA nukes come from?
The Bush administration is pro-nuke in general. It makes a certain amount of sense to push them for space, where the energy/mass ratio is so much more important than for anything on terra firma.
And my third question, why is space so passe to Slashdotters and by extension tech oriented fans in general?
First man in space was over 40 years ago. The last manned moon landing was over 30 years ago. To the average geek, the World Wide Web is now and s/he can have a lot of fun (and get a job) getting hands dirty hacking with the code. Space stuff is before they were born, making it pre-history, their parents' generation's stuff; it's passé. It's also locked up behind requirements of graduate school and other barriers which keep them from having a chance to play with it, so they migrate to the things which are accessible.
The problems people face on the trip are radiation damage and muscular degeneration. To combat these you need shielding (several feet of rock to stop cosmic rays) and artificial gravity. I don't see how a cycler made out of spent fuel tanks is going to provide a good meteoroid shield, let alone a solution to these big problems. It looks more like money wasted.
Now, if Aldrin was talking about cyclers made from small asteroids he'd be talking about enough size to embed a large centrifuge inside a shielded volume. But that's not what he's talking about (probably because the people in government are thinking about asteroids as weapons of planetary destruction, and at that scale they're right).
Slashdot Mirror
I think the solution is to divest both the phone and cable companies of their wires, and divide them into carriers and service providers. If the company that owns and maintains the wires has no interest in the services being delivered, they are in no position to discriminate against any comers because they're all paying the same rate anyway.
And if they miss? They won't be seeing any neutrinos coming from the source accelerator. If they aimed at you, you'd never notice any more than you notice the millions of solar neutrinos streaking through your body every second like ghost bullets from an etherial machine gun. Hey, they don't even slime you...
The collisions of protons with targets don't make neutrinos, they make pions. Charged pions can be directed magnetically; when they decay to muons, they create neutrinos and when the muons decay to electrons they create still more neutrinos. If the kinetic energy of the decay is small compared to the energy of the original beam, the neutrinos will be travelling in more or less the same direction as the parent particles.
- The machine could not malfunction in a way which would harm the patient, and
- The machine would not report erroneous data which could lead to harm from subsequent mis-treatment of the patient.
How you'd demonstrate such things given the legendary instability of Windows, I have no idea.This probably means that critical systems on things like ships should not be running any flavor of Windows, nor maybe Linux either. There are a bunch of OS's made for embedded systems, and due to their small size and simplicity they are much smaller, probably faster, and certainly less vulnerable or even completely invulnerable to this kind of attack. If your requirements are that stringent, that's what you should be using.
Somehow I don't think that a solid block or sheet of polymer presents anything like the same threat from the battery being broken open.
Instead of buying clips, try sticking the suction cups to the board with clear silicone RTV sealant. It will still peel off, but only when you want it to (it takes considerable effort).
- How many cycles can they take before they have degraded by, say, 50%?
- How difficult are they to recycle or destroy?
- If they are released into the environment, do they pose a pollution hazard akin to the fine asbestos fibers which are known to cause lung disease?
None of those things were covered in the article, and they'd be very nice to know. If the nanotubes don't offer as good a lifespan as the proton polymer battery, or you'd have a health hazard if the fibers were dispersed, these things are not going to be the panacea they appear from the article.Just because the Branch Davidians were horribly mistreated, persecuted and some of them murdrered by the US government does not mean that the majority of them were not suicides. It gave them reason to kill themselves, to avoid the abuse the were certain would come (and lose their salvation). Claiming that the US government actually committed the crime of arson is weak and diverts attention from the crimes which are undeniable... and very successfully.
ISTR that the one incendiary-type gas canister found on the premises was fired hours before the fire broke out. And on top of this, many of the dead were found shot to death (including Koresh himself).
While you won't have any trouble showing that the tactics of the government were ridiculous (if they wanted Koresh they could have arrested him when he went into town, alone), there is nothing to support the case that the tear gas caused the fires. The evidence proves that the Davidians committed suicide, as their apocalyptic theology demanded that they die; the government's stupidity was in pushing them in ways all but guaranteed to make them do it.
Pebble manufacture is probably the smallest problem. If your graphite moderator is sufficiently pure, you can use natural uranium and you have no enrichment or other steps and no byproducts. Yellowcake (uranium dioxide) is probably one of the least-difficult materials to work with; it's been used as a colorant in pottery glazes.
It's probably going to be a lot easier for companies to move a relatively short distance, like SF to Sacramento. This gives the workers a lot more options if they decide to reconsider in the short term, and the influx of high-tech companies means that the deficit of employment options is going down rapidly.
I also think I ought to be able to get credit for what I post. People who are reading the comments are reading for the comments, especially for the highly-rated comments; they are your bread and butter. If I am contributing to your bottom line I ought to be given some kind of credit for it. I don't even read comments on ZDNet any more because their system refuses to let me read comfortably (piles of ads and links on every response), and if Slashdot becomes as hostile to good posters as ZDNet is to readers, there will be no point in trying to contribute here any more.
And don't you dare count moderation or meta-moderation work against page-views! You won't have anyone left who's worth a damn.
The real difficulty you're going to have is that the number of usable gametes you're going to get falls exponentially with the number of chromosomes you're trying to select for. After you get to four or five traits you've got a choice: either you're going to have to be able to pick individual chromosomes and build custom nuclei, or you're going to have to select a "best-of-N" instead of a pure optimum. The "best-of-N" preserves large elements of chance.
This is still not bad. If it gives parents a shot at having a child who'll do best in their environment, or allows parents the knowledge that their child will do best if they provide a certain environment, it's all for the better. The same tests which show what environmental influences are best will help children who aren't specifically selected for certain traits to get the best out of what they've got. This is coming whether you want it or not; the technology is essential to tell what drugs will benefit individuals and what side effects they might have, and the other knowledge will follow behind it. Soon we are going to have the knowledge once reserved to deities, whether we want it or not; we had better be prepared to act on it humanely.I'd love to read it, but when I click on the link I get a page with no article text.
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Thermodynamics (why you can't get something for nothing)
Instead, a lot of people's "thinking" involves conspiracy theories about what interests are behind some nefarious plot or other. There is a huge amount of nonsense from the left about hydrogen power (from people who barely know that hydrogen is part of water, don't know that hydrogen is 11% of water by mass, and couldn't tell you where the energy for their hydrogen economy would come from if their lives depended on it) and an equal amount from the right about greenhouse gases and ozone depletion (from people who have no clue about the difference between atomic chlorine and chloride ion, and why the chemistry or atmospheric lifetime would be different). Reason requires knowledge of the facts beneath the conclusion, and learning those facts (education) is mandatory, not optional. You can't think if you have nothing to think with.This is the strongest argument I know for demanding that all 4-year college degrees require basic science, chemistry and mathematics. Too much basic citizenship has come to rely on it, and the point of college isn't supposed to be to turn out drones (or ideological infantry) but well-rounded citizens.
Scientists aren't always practicing science. What else is new?A lot of "greenie" measures make a huge amount of sense if you use basic economic analysis. The problem is that lots of people don't bother because they apply one set of measures to "normal" expenses like a house, but demand a much greater payback from environmental improvements. People will often demand that an environmental measure pay its cost in a year or less, which is insane when the lifespan of the improvement can be 20 years or more. Such things should be evaluated on the basis of long-term capital expenditures, standard mortgage rates, and other cornerstones of economic payback analysis. (The problem is that most people have no idea how to do even the most basic analysis, so they will stick money in a savings account earning a taxable 2% a year when they could buy some CF bulbs and be earning 25% per year tax-free on the same money.)
That sounds more like a certain theory for the collapse of white dwarfs under infalling matter. Supposedly this would always happen at the same mass and produce uniformly bright supernovae.
This pulsar is in a globular cluster, which probably contains a number of other neutron stars already. Sooner or later two of them are going to make close passes and get captured into a mutual orbit, which will then decay. When the two neutron stars merge they will likely collapse catastrophically into a black hole, with the added excitement of kilohertz gravitational waves thrown in.
Thing is, for a cycler that's doing its orbital corrections with something like a solar sail, I don't see why you can't have ten tons per square meter. It would let crews ride the cyclers indefinitely, instead of being limited to one or two spins in a lifetime.
Hey, it's speculation, whaddaya want?
Now, if Aldrin was talking about cyclers made from small asteroids he'd be talking about enough size to embed a large centrifuge inside a shielded volume. But that's not what he's talking about (probably because the people in government are thinking about asteroids as weapons of planetary destruction, and at that scale they're right).