Did you read what I wrote?
on
The DNA Bomb
·
· Score: 2
Actually, Ebola isn't that infective if common preventative measures are taken.
I think you need to work on your reading comprehension, because I addressed that:
If someone engineered a virus which had the gene for the Ebola toxin but was spread by sneezing...
With modern techniques it might not even be that hard. Someone might be out in Africa right now, digging up a corpse from one of the Ebola outbreaks to get a virus sample. Of course, this would work a lot better against the ignorant masses of humanity living in crowded shantytowns in the third world than it would against the relatively well-educated Western societies, and it would be really hard to keep such a disease which could spread in the West from getting to those less-classy breeding grounds. The perpetrators of such an attack would be on just about everyone's fecal roster worldwide. --
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And you don't even begin to talk about viruses and prions.
Ebola and influenza are both viral diseases.
I don't worry about prions; they require bad farming practices (like feeing animal-derived feed back to animals) to spread them. They are also ineffective for terrorism; they take years or decades to become evident, and biotech may find cures long before the majority of the infected develop symptoms. No terrorist is going to bother working with prions when bacteria and viruses have so much more promise. --
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Like a we-do-not-tolerate-clearly-dangerous-cults- precedent?
Define "dangerous cult" on the basis of its teachings (good luck!).
It wouldn't be hard to get rid of the Co$; all you would have to do is attack it as an organization for its criminal acts under laws like RICO (the "fair game" practices are hard evidence of criminal conspiracy), throw any of the officials involved in these practices in jail and sell off the assets of the organization to compensate the victims. If the Co$ had no $, it would be toothless.
I see no reason why the same legal doctrine which destroyed the Klan in the south wouldn't suffice to eliminate the Co$ organization. Without the organization providing cover for the unlawful activities and sucking the money out of people's pockets, the practice itself would be pretty harmless. --
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The DA and judge are probably both Scientologists; the Co$ has been making lots of efforts to infiltrate the legal system.
Henson has had this problem before. Maybe this is a set-up for the DA and the judge, to get the decision reversed on appeal (very humiliating to the judge) and get grounds to disbar the judge or at least have him prevented from hearing any more Co$-related cases. We can all hope. --
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Wonder why aren't we all dead from [insert deadly virus here]? Because all living systems have defense systems.
Doesn't matter. Ebola is extremely infective if you are exposed and has a mortality rate of about 90%. If you have the kind of massive collapse of society that occurred in remote areas during the influenza epidemic early in the 20th century, just about everyone who fell sick would die because there would be nobody to take care of them. If too many people are sick you have no electricity or running water, and then you have even the "immune" people dying from dysentery, fires running through cities.... People do become immune to flu; it didn't help.
What's kept us safe from diseases like Ebola is the sheer geographic isolation of the places where it is endemic, the rarity with which people encounter the animal vectors and the route of infection going through (easily-avoided) bodily fluids. If someone engineered a virus which had the gene for the Ebola toxin but was spread by sneezing and blew it around an international airport, the entire world would be gefukt. --
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... short of a metric assload of lead sheilding, theres nothing you can do about a neutron bomb.
Not even lead will save you from neutrons; what you want is hydrogen (water). THEN you use heavy stuff (lead works fine, so does stone) to stop the neutron-capture gammas. A pile of damp earth over some concrete is a reasonably effective shield. --
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If old tired lines bother you, don't repeat them.
on
Telecosm
·
· Score: 1
Gilder, you might recall, was the hack behind the "Laffer Curve", which was lame justification for Reagan's nutty tax cuts (what's a few trillion more on the national debt among friends?).
Except that the tax cuts resulted in more revenue, not less. It was the Democrat-majority legislature that refused to hold the line on spending and created the enormous deficits.
The truth of the Laffer curve keeps being proven: tax cuts are increasing revenues to the present day. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a nice little graph for your edification; projections of capital-gains tax revenue from 1997 through 2000 were US$ 190-odd billion at the 28% rate, but after the rate cut to 20% actual revenues were US$ 307 billion. If you counted the increased revenue from excise and payroll taxes which went along with the increase in capital formation caused by the tax cuts, the reduction in rates paid for itself many times over. It might even have created the boom of the last few years. --
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Re:Maybe we're hitting on the wrong people?
on
RFC for Spammers
·
· Score: 1
Consider for a moment the relative sizes of the two jobs.... --
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You're the first person I've actually heard pitching zero tolerance because it insulates people from lawsuits.
I do nothing of the sort. I said,
the administrations believe, rightly or wrongly, that "zero tolerance" policies which allow no discretion will insulate the district from lawsuits which allege discriminatory enforcement.
Notice that I said that this was a result of the administrations' beliefs, and allowed that they could be wrong (not to mention completely idiotic for e.g. suspending a student for possessing fingernail clippers). Please stop reading your own prejudices into my words. --
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You're absolutely correct. To be a little more specific, the article talks about a 400 MW powerplant to run this data center, which has up to 500,000 servers (in 250,000 square feet; those are going to be tall racks). 400 MW is about 1.36 billion BTU/hour. If you assume that the inside temperature is 30 C, the outside temperature is -50 C, and the ceiling is insulated to R-10, the ceiling will leak 8 BTU/f^2/hour or 2 million BTU/hour total (you can probably ignore the walls). This is about 0.2% of the heat generated by server farm (500,000 servers at 800 watts apiece, total 400 megawatts).
Cooling is going to be the problem, even on the North Slope. It would be smart to run a pipe out into the Arctic ocean and bring in cold seawater for cooling purposes; a secondary glycol loop running to chiller plates in the servers would make for a relatively cheap and reliable cooling system for the summers. For winter, just circulate the glycol through pipes on the roof or dry cooling towers. --
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There's only one reason ever for "zero tolerance" policies: because it is administratively easier for the policy setters.
No, you've missed what is probably the most important reason: the administrations believe, rightly or wrongly, that "zero tolerance" policies which allow no discretion will insulate the district from lawsuits which allege discriminatory enforcement. There have been suits against districts because certain minority groups have higher punishment/suspension rates than the majority, and these suits are expensive to defend and even more expensive to lose. If you're looking for a culprit here, you have to include the plaintiff's bar and the "civil rights [wrongs]" crusaders as well as school admins; they are all responsible for different parts of this problem, due to the law of unintended consequences.
Fear of lawsuits keeps people from doing all kinds of things that are truly in the public interest, like exposing the abuses of the creators of censorware block-lists. It's neither reasonable nor fair to demonize school administrators for buckling under those same forces; our duty as citizens is to get rid of these abuses of the legal system so people are no longer taking risks when they try to do the right thing. --
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Most places I've worked have not leaned that heavily on document-control systems for things like that; there is the most up-to-date version and that's pretty much all you need. (I currently work in an environment where there is a huge document-control system, but I use it so seldom I have forgotten how to get into it.)
You probably need to have someone in control over the mess, and if that person can manage a directory tree which is read-only to everyone but the archivist you could easily keep a "history" directory beneath each leaf and stick old versions down there (with filenames containing the date of the revision). That would give you lots of history and a ready means of re-organizing if you find a tool that lets you manage things more easily in the future. --
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I suspect there's a lot of music that's popular by virtue of the marketing muscle behind it rather than the actual quality of the music.
And has been at least since the advent of payola, and most likely for a long time before that; nothing has changed since except the window-dressing.
Fortunately some people are smart enough to see through the marketroid-hype, as shown by the demise of the XFL. The problem is that music is largely marketed to children and teenagers who have poorly-developed BS filters. --
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The B&M Gates Foundations spends how much money each year on AIDS work etc? (positive)
Microsoft spends how much money each year on monopolization, "embrace-extend-and-extinguish" strategies, and FUD aimed at cutting off the consumer's choices? (negative>
I'll bet that the balance is way on the negative side. --
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It's about time schools had tools like this. It used to be that some students would not bother reading source material and write (or copy) their assignments from Cliff's Notes instead. Today that trick is going to pop up a big flag marked "PLAGIARIZED!". Not a bit too soon, either, because lack of writing ability is one of the worst failings in today's students and the only way to learn to write is by doing it;
As goatherd learns his trade by goat,
so writer learns his trade by wrote.
There will be a few ways to get around the immediate checks.... for a while. Cribbing papers from people at other schools (which don't share databases) wouldn't raise flags, but that only works until someone starts merging files and checking the history.
The only true fix is going to be the custom-written paper. Not only is this expensive, but it's not too hard for analysis to see if two papers were written by the same author. If your work comes back with a bunch of different writers' "fingerprints" on it... busted! Time to buckle down and do your own work! --
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What's wrong with the scenario is that your tube is transparent (and absorbs no more light than the air around it), it is very narrow and would have a lot of viscous drag robbing the power you'd want your turbines to grab, and you're postulating a heat engine that wouldn't be terribly efficient anyway; for all the weight of that glass tube you'd be better off with solar cells.
You might also want to look at this. --
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I seem to recall a story that went something like this:
On a discussion of ways to purify U-235 for making an atomic bomb (this was in the 1940's), a scientist was talking about atomic-mass spectrometers. He said, "A unit can purify uranium-235 more than sufficiently to make a bomb, but it would take a million years to purify enough for just one bomb."
Someone from the audience said, "So you build a million units, then it only takes one year."
We currently make cable in machines that go much more than one mile per hour. The rest is just assembly and orbital mechanics (you have to put the stuff in orbit and build it downward, or rather outward both ways from geosynchronous orbit). --
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The effects of the billions of tons of carbon tubules smashing into Mars as the space elevator falls (wrapping itself around Mars in the process) is on a par with the destruction caused by asteroid/comet impact.
At the risk of rendering my previous comments redundant, I'm going to pick this apart in a bit of detail.
First, the lower parts of the elevator are very, very thin. If you just let them drop by themselves, they would be slowed to a relatively low speed by an atmosphere of any significant density. They don't have very far to fall in the first place.
Second, the upper parts of the elevator are almost (geo/are)synchronous already. Cut them loose from the parts below and they stay in orbit; there is no "Earth-shattering kaboom!"
The problem parts are the ones in the middle. If you have a mechanism to cut pieces off on command (and you'd have to, for damage management from space debris) you could just chop off chunks from the bottom as it dipped into the atmosphere; splitting them into narrow strands is good for extra points. Because the bottom end of the elevator-fragment is moving slowly, there is little energy in it and it can mostly be dissipated in the atmosphere.
The falling of the elevator-fragment turns potential energy into kinetic energy, and chopping off the bottom end by degrees leaves most of that energy with the upper part. Eventually you've transferred enough energy to the remaining fragment that it has assumed an orbit. It's kind of useless as an elevator, but so long as you have raw materials floating around conveniently like that it would be not unreasonable to have a new elevator going in a very short time, built out of the salvaged pieces of the old one.
You'd have to have this kind of failure-mode effects management built into the elevator anyway because a chunk of space rock could do what KSR's terrorists do. This renders the terrorist scenario just a little bit unbelievable in practice, regardless of how great a literary scene it makes.
In conclusion, I don't think that this is the kind of thing it makes sense to worry about even with today's technology, let alone the kind of damage-response mechanisms we will have developed by the time we get around to building things like this. --
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imagine what the falling elevator would do when it hits an ocean.
Except that the parts of the elevator that would be fat enough to make such a big splash are also high enough that they could just be cut loose from the parts below and they would assume an orbit instead of re-entering. Depending where the break is, you might have almost nothing come down. --
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The main problem seems to be the amount of carbon to make the tubules.
That's no problem at all. You extract it from the air (directly or indirectly). This eliminates the possibility of global warming from human CO2 emissions, and interestingly enough, the weaker your fibers turn out to be the more fiber you need (it is wider at the top end), the more carbon you extract and the more coal and oil you offset. --
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... that's multiple single points of failure and additional pieces of hardware.
The UPS is such a big chunk of hardware because it tries to output 110 volts 60 Hz. Putting it in the PC's switcher eliminates all those frequency and voltage constraints, and makes it vastly smaller, lighter and cheaper. Plus, you have other markets open up:
People who want to put a computer in an RV, and don't want to run an inverter all the time they're away from mains power.
People who use solar or wind power, ditto.
Your point about the power supply market having big economies of scale is a good one, but the number of consumers in California, New York and other areas which have a > 50% likelihood of being hit by blackouts in the near future makes a pretty good market by itself, and enough volume to justify a power supply aimed at their needs. If you could get it into Dell as one of their options, they'd sell like hotcakes. --
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(I know you're just a silly little troll, but I have a point to make.) You start off okay....
I am required by state law to have a no smoking section, and it is pointless. None of my non-smoking customers really feel like it helps, and my smoking customers are forced to sit in one part of the restaurant, the same way blacks were once forced into separate sections in the South.
... except for the reference to Jim Crow. (Smokers are not oppressed. They can sit anywhere they want and do anything they want so long as they aren't smoking.) But then you jump to this:
We should remove the requirement for no smoking sections in restaurants.
That does not follow. You should put up walls between the smoking and non-smoking sections and prevent any air that has come from the smoking section from going anywhere else except outside (separate HVAC and an exhaust fan). Then your non-smoking patrons will not have any problems with smoke.
I know this works, because I've done it. --
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Most 802.11b transmitters are at about 30 mW, or -15 dBm. In other words, you are 15 dB below the maximum allowed transmitter power. So your antenna gain must not exceed 15 + 6 or 21 dB. Judging from the pictures in the article, it looks like they are using dish antennae with probably 23 dB of gain.
True, as far as it goes. But nothing says that you can't use separate transmitting and receiving antennas! If you have a 21 dB transmitting antenna and a 27 dB receiving antenna, that's got the same path gain as two 23 dB antennas (at more than twice the cost, of course). You could probably finesse this with a separate transmit feeder which is slightly off-focus to achieve the lower gain from the same dish. In principle, there is no reason you couldn't use omnidirectional transmitters with pinpoint-precision receive dishes or even microwave lenses (zone-plates, anyone?) to stay within the absolute letter of the law and give nobody the slightest excuse to complain... except about making the telcos look bad, of course. --
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Would you care to describe a couple of them for us?
Sorry,I'm not a medical researcher, I can't name any offhand. I do know that there are conditions associated with the proliferation of malfunctioning mitochondria and that drugs have been withdrawn because they were found to cause mitochondrial failure; check here. If you look at Google for "mitochondria disease" you'll get about 35,000 hits. --
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Slashdot Mirror
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I don't worry about prions; they require bad farming practices (like feeing animal-derived feed back to animals) to spread them. They are also ineffective for terrorism; they take years or decades to become evident, and biotech may find cures long before the majority of the infected develop symptoms. No terrorist is going to bother working with prions when bacteria and viruses have so much more promise.
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
It wouldn't be hard to get rid of the Co$; all you would have to do is attack it as an organization for its criminal acts under laws like RICO (the "fair game" practices are hard evidence of criminal conspiracy), throw any of the officials involved in these practices in jail and sell off the assets of the organization to compensate the victims. If the Co$ had no $, it would be toothless.
I see no reason why the same legal doctrine which destroyed the Klan in the south wouldn't suffice to eliminate the Co$ organization. Without the organization providing cover for the unlawful activities and sucking the money out of people's pockets, the practice itself would be pretty harmless.
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Henson has had this problem before. Maybe this is a set-up for the DA and the judge, to get the decision reversed on appeal (very humiliating to the judge) and get grounds to disbar the judge or at least have him prevented from hearing any more Co$-related cases. We can all hope.
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
What's kept us safe from diseases like Ebola is the sheer geographic isolation of the places where it is endemic, the rarity with which people encounter the animal vectors and the route of infection going through (easily-avoided) bodily fluids. If someone engineered a virus which had the gene for the Ebola toxin but was spread by sneezing and blew it around an international airport, the entire world would be gefukt.
--
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
The truth of the Laffer curve keeps being proven: tax cuts are increasing revenues to the present day. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a nice little graph for your edification; projections of capital-gains tax revenue from 1997 through 2000 were US$ 190-odd billion at the 28% rate, but after the rate cut to 20% actual revenues were US$ 307 billion. If you counted the increased revenue from excise and payroll taxes which went along with the increase in capital formation caused by the tax cuts, the reduction in rates paid for itself many times over. It might even have created the boom of the last few years.
--
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Consider for a moment the relative sizes of the two jobs....
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Cooling is going to be the problem, even on the North Slope. It would be smart to run a pipe out into the Arctic ocean and bring in cold seawater for cooling purposes; a secondary glycol loop running to chiller plates in the servers would make for a relatively cheap and reliable cooling system for the summers. For winter, just circulate the glycol through pipes on the roof or dry cooling towers.
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Fear of lawsuits keeps people from doing all kinds of things that are truly in the public interest, like exposing the abuses of the creators of censorware block-lists. It's neither reasonable nor fair to demonize school administrators for buckling under those same forces; our duty as citizens is to get rid of these abuses of the legal system so people are no longer taking risks when they try to do the right thing.
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
You probably need to have someone in control over the mess, and if that person can manage a directory tree which is read-only to everyone but the archivist you could easily keep a "history" directory beneath each leaf and stick old versions down there (with filenames containing the date of the revision). That would give you lots of history and a ready means of re-organizing if you find a tool that lets you manage things more easily in the future.
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Fortunately some people are smart enough to see through the marketroid-hype, as shown by the demise of the XFL. The problem is that music is largely marketed to children and teenagers who have poorly-developed BS filters.
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Microsoft spends how much money each year on monopolization, "embrace-extend-and-extinguish" strategies, and FUD aimed at cutting off the consumer's choices? (negative>
I'll bet that the balance is way on the negative side.
--
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- Boot from floppy,
- fdisk, and
- install Linux.
I've been happy as a clam ever since.--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
The only true fix is going to be the custom-written paper. Not only is this expensive, but it's not too hard for analysis to see if two papers were written by the same author. If your work comes back with a bunch of different writers' "fingerprints" on it... busted! Time to buckle down and do your own work!
--
Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
You might also want to look at this.
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On a discussion of ways to purify U-235 for making an atomic bomb (this was in the 1940's), a scientist was talking about atomic-mass spectrometers. He said, "A unit can purify uranium-235 more than sufficiently to make a bomb, but it would take a million years to purify enough for just one bomb."
Someone from the audience said, "So you build a million units, then it only takes one year."
We currently make cable in machines that go much more than one mile per hour. The rest is just assembly and orbital mechanics (you have to put the stuff in orbit and build it downward, or rather outward both ways from geosynchronous orbit).
--
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- First, the lower parts of the elevator are very, very thin. If you just let them drop by themselves, they would be slowed to a relatively low speed by an atmosphere of any significant density. They don't have very far to fall in the first place.
- Second, the upper parts of the elevator are almost (geo/are)synchronous already. Cut them loose from the parts below and they stay in orbit; there is no "Earth-shattering kaboom!"
- The problem parts are the ones in the middle. If you have a mechanism to cut pieces off on command (and you'd have to, for damage management from space debris) you could just chop off chunks from the bottom as it dipped into the atmosphere; splitting them into narrow strands is good for extra points. Because the bottom end of the elevator-fragment is moving slowly, there is little energy in it and it can mostly be dissipated in the atmosphere.
- The falling of the elevator-fragment turns potential energy into kinetic energy, and chopping off the bottom end by degrees leaves most of that energy with the upper part. Eventually you've transferred enough energy to the remaining fragment that it has assumed an orbit. It's kind of useless as an elevator, but so long as you have raw materials floating around conveniently like that it would be not unreasonable to have a new elevator going in a very short time, built out of the salvaged pieces of the old one.
- You'd have to have this kind of failure-mode effects management built into the elevator anyway because a chunk of space rock could do what KSR's terrorists do. This renders the terrorist scenario just a little bit unbelievable in practice, regardless of how great a literary scene it makes.
In conclusion, I don't think that this is the kind of thing it makes sense to worry about even with today's technology, let alone the kind of damage-response mechanisms we will have developed by the time we get around to building things like this.--
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The UPS is such a big chunk of hardware because it tries to output 110 volts 60 Hz. Putting it in the PC's switcher eliminates all those frequency and voltage constraints, and makes it vastly smaller, lighter and cheaper. Plus, you have other markets open up:
- People who want to put a computer in an RV, and don't want to run an inverter all the time they're away from mains power.
- People who use solar or wind power, ditto.
Your point about the power supply market having big economies of scale is a good one, but the number of consumers in California, New York and other areas which have a > 50% likelihood of being hit by blackouts in the near future makes a pretty good market by itself, and enough volume to justify a power supply aimed at their needs. If you could get it into Dell as one of their options, they'd sell like hotcakes.--
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I know this works, because I've done it.
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