Especially if you're throwing your baseball into my yard for the specific purpose of disrupting my garden party, because you have a moral objection to garden parties.
"If you do not drop the suit now, or submit the claimed infringing code as evidence in ten days, the suit will be dismissed with prejudice, you will pay all court costs and legal fees for the defendant, and you will be jailed for contempt of court."
Nuclear power is *not* a savour even under the best-case scenarios. Lead times are so huge, and fuel lifetimes so short (like 20 years or less) that the overall impact they'll make is basically zero.
Long lead time arguments are mostly an "Eric and Lyle Menendez demand the court's mercy because they are orphans" argument. Omni-obstructionists use over-the-top scaremongering and blatant barratry to force huge delays to any nuclear project, then use the long delays that they have caused themselves as an argument.
"20 years of uranium" is a bogus number that has been debunked many times. 1) 20 years proven reserves does not mean it will run out in 20 years. 2) That's 20 years proven reserves assuming the current insanely wasteful "once-through, throw most of the fuel away" fuel non-cycle. Reprocess the wastes, and the proven reserves goes up vastly. 3) That's also assuming that breeder reactors will be forever banned. Add breeders to the mix, and that's another huge boost to proven reserves. 4) Thorium reactors. According to the CRC handbook, thorium is about as common as lead, and "There is probably more energy available from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels combined." And finally, 5) back in the 1970s, Japan demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water at a cost of about $100/pound in 1970 dollars. That's expensive... but you get enough energy out of fission that it would make sense if there were no other source.
It's pretty easy to verify that Gingrich has been a "space nut" for a very long time. This isn't a one-time "pander to the folks in Central Florida" thing. He read Jerry Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out" back in the 80s, and was sufficiently interested by it to contact Pournelle personally to discuss the ideas in it.
(Rants about Pournelle's politics, Gingrich's politics, are entirely beside the point I'm making here.)
Not to defend Newt's record of marital fidelity, which is pretty horrible, but you don't help the case when you inflate that horrible record with things that are not true.
"Dying of cancer".... No. Jackie Battley is still alive, actually. And regarding the "serving divorce papers in the hospital" thing, Newt's daughter by that first wife says "I was there. It did not happen."
There are real problems and dangers that this proposal is (for public consumption, at least) intended to address. However, what comes out at the end of the process worries me. Some of these things, in the past, have ended up with wording to ensure that only goverments and "Big Aerospace" companies under contract to governments are permitted to do anything in space. (Thinking about the "Moon Treaty", for instance.)
"Big Aerospace" is perfectly happy for cost-to-orbit to remain astronomical. Cheap, routine access to space is never going to come from them, the only chance for it is companies like Space-X, Scaled Composits, X-COR, etc. "Big Aerospace" would like nothing better than to to guarantee that these companies are shut out, forever.
At a previous employer, which used SAP, it not only required you to run IE and only IE. It not only required you to allow Active-X. It required you to configure IE to maximum promiscuity run *ALL* Active-X without prompting. The SAP web page checked, and if you had "At least ask for permission before reaming me with Active-X" set, it wouldn't run.
It's been a few years; maybe SAP is better now. And maybe that reckless insanity was entirely the fault of whoever installed it there, not SAP's fault. It sure gave me a bad feeling about SAP, though.
Google also was blazing fast compared to the other search engines at the time, and came back with better results. Usually. The first time I used it, I left the other search engines and didn't look back. At least, not much.
The only reason I used to continue to use Altavista occasionally was when I needed its "word1 near word2" search capability. I often miss the absence of that feature on Google. (I haven't even gone to altavista.com in years, though... I just checked now, and it's still there, though apparently it's part of Yahoo now.)
I seem to recall 6,000 lbs, but your point is accurate - most cars and light duty pickups and all but the biggest SUVs will fall into that range. Basically puts a line where trucks like the F150 will count, but the heavy "work trucks" (F250/350) are exempt.
Politicians are, in general, perfectly ignorant of basic physics, and firmly believe the laws of physics are subject to government regulation. King Canute lives!
So, what's going to happen is, if Ford can't meet the new CAFE standard with the F150 in the fleet, they'll simply quit making it, and the people who wanted an F150 will buy an F250 instead. Just like what really caused the SUV boom -- many of the people who buy them really want and need a station wagon, but the auto makers couldn't meet the CAFE standard with station wagons in the fleet, so they quit making them, and people who needed the capacity of a station wagon were forced into much less fuel-efficient vans, mini-vans, or SUVs instead.
The other thing that will happen is, the new cars will be much less car for much more money. People will be much more inclined to just keep driving their old clunker, or buy a used car.
In a debate on TED talks, taking the pro-nuclear side, Stuart Brand said something that sums up the whole thing: "I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."
The anti-nukes keep making assertions about how we "don't need nuclear or fossil fuels" that are violations of basic arithmetic.
Assuming we're to be permitted to continue having a technological civilization, of course, which is not, perhaps, a given.
Power reactors do not produce plutonium for bombs. A power reactor fuel cycle produces plutonium that contains a substantial percentage of the isotopes Pu240 and Pu242. These are fine for reactor fuel, but they have a high spontaneous fission rate, which makes them very bad for bombs. (Hint: Neither India nor Pakistan used plutonium from their power reactors to make their bombs -- they both went to the great trouble and expense of building special-purpose breeder reactors. Ask yourself why.)
TFA has been melted into slag by slashdotting, so maybe the author covered this, but I wonder what, exactly, is meant by "intellectual"? A lot of what passes for it has less to do with rational works of the intellect than with currently trendy fashions among those who pat themselves on the back for being "intellectuals."
Geeks tend to not go along with that sort of crowd. (They have their own sorts of crowds.)
I would love to see some channels aimed at intelligent niche markets. Unfortunately, every channel tries to go for the same lowest common denominator market as every other channel. I was really excited when I heard that there was going to be a Sci Fi Channel. The reality was... disappointing, but there was good stuff on it occasionally. At first. But they cancelled everything good to make more room for brain-rotting abominations like wrestling and psychics. Actual science fiction is on other channels.
If they go pay, they would have to put some real science fiction on it that generated a lot of positive buzz before I'd even consider looking into what they're offering. I think the odds of that happening are as close to zero as makes no difference. "Ca
I've used both pwsafe and KeePass... I never cared for KeePass, and had just moved all my passwords back to pwsafe when I found out about LastPass, got convinced it was "secure enough" by Steve Gibson, and never looked back.
The big deal for me at the time, once past the "secure enough" thing, was that pwsafe was Windows only. KeePass did not have a means of syncing passwords that might be changed on multiple machines. Even with pwsafe, I had to carry my database around and sync it with my other machines by hand, and they were constantly getting out of sync.
LastPass keeps passwords up to date on every machine you use it on. It's just about every platform -- every platform I have wanted to use it on, anyway; Windows, Mac, Linux, Android.
I don't see any reason to give up on them due to this -- they seem to me to be acting with an excess of paranoia. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, given their product... nothing wrong with it at all.) And I certainly do not have a password that would easily be brute-forced -- annoyingly long, with numbers, mixed case, and punctuation.
Dang, I sure hope they figure out this was a false alarm and rescind the "you must change your password" thing. I spent a lot of time working on this very secure password that I won't forget.
Complain to the advertisers whose wares are being touted on these bogus pages. Let them know that Mediacom's fraudulent search pages reflect badly on them.
Most people just believe what "Science Journalists" (who are journalists, not scientists) tell them about science. The state of "Science Journalism" is generally pretty exasperating for those who know anything about whatever subject they're writing about today.
I have done the Millikan Oil Drop experiment myself. I did not get very good results, but I have no doubt that Millikan (or the graduate students working for him) got the results claimed. His apparatus was probably in better condition, with the optics not smeared with the oil from all the other students trying to get through that physics lab in the lab time allotted for it. (I'm reasonably confidant that the 1/3 charge I saw on one oil drop was experimental error.)
You are setting up a straw man yourself. Their claim is not simply that Jesus existed but that he was the "son of god" come to earth and that he "died for our sins". Their claim is that he was a deity, for which there is NO credible evidence of any kind anywhere..
The whole of Christianity hinges on the Resurrection: whether that tomb really was empty the Sunday after that Passover.
There's pretty good reason to believe that, at least, something unusual happened -- Paul wouldn't have used the argument "Some of you were eye-witnesses to these events" in his letters if he didn't think "these events" supported what he was preaching. (He was writing his letters for particular people at the time, not for us 2000 years later.)
I remember a couple of Tom Baker ones -- one, he uses a rubber ball to propel himself from one spacecraft to the other. Throws it at the ship he's leaving, catches it on the bounce, throws it back... until he gains enough velocity to get to the other ship. (It was a plot point that Time Lords can survive in vacuum for a while.)
Another one, on a planet with a methane atmosphere, Baker's Doctor needs to set off an explosion. He does it by opening the valves on some oxygen tanks. That's the sort of "reversal of what you'd expect on Earth" thing that Asimov did in a few of his stories.
And... forgetting the name of Baker's successor... there was a signal they needed to figure out what it was, and the math genius kid Adric said "Oh, I can just do a Fourier analysis on this!" In a context where that actually made sense.
Don't expect it to be rigorous science fiction, though. As someone else said, it's "science fantasy", often with the emphasis on "fantasy." They never let consistency get in the way of the story they want to tell. I haven't seen those episodes, but I'm told there were four separate, and completely inconsistent with each other, episodes set at the Sinking of Atlantis. And in the reboot, how can "Gallifrey is destroyed, I am the last Timelord," matter if he is, you know, a *TIME TRAVELLER*, who in the old series, traveled far in the future of anything shown in the new series.
To a greater or lesser extent, you have to turn part of your brain off. But it can be fun. I used to watch it, but kind of lost interest at some point.
Right... I don't see how anyone pretending to know anything about the history of the computer virus phenomenon could fail to mention the Pakistani Brain Virus.
What Stuxnet targets is pretty well known -- the controllers for those uranium isotope separating centrifuges. It changes the speed to physically damage them. The reporter didn't even attempt to pretend that he'd done his homework.
It looks like whoever's behind "Courage to Resist" might be using the whole Bradley Manning thing to change PayPal's long-standing policy on linking bank accounts.
I've never had a bank account linked to my PayPal, but I've never used it to receive money, just to buy stuff. There is, I think I recall, some dollar limit at which point they'll say "you can't use PayPal any more until you give us a bank account", but I don't seem to have hit it yet. (I think it was $10,000? If so, it'll be decades.)
Maybe the thing people need to investigate is why this so-called "Courage to Resist" refuses to work with PayPal the way PayPal has always required.
Slashdot Mirror
But note that Arthur C. Clarke spoke favorably of "Perelandra" in one of his essays.
Especially if you're throwing your baseball into my yard for the specific purpose of disrupting my garden party, because you have a moral objection to garden parties.
"If you do not drop the suit now, or submit the claimed infringing code as evidence in ten days, the suit will be dismissed with prejudice, you will pay all court costs and legal fees for the defendant, and you will be jailed for contempt of court."
Nuclear power is *not* a savour even under the best-case scenarios. Lead times are so huge, and fuel lifetimes so short (like 20 years or less) that the overall impact they'll make is basically zero.
Long lead time arguments are mostly an "Eric and Lyle Menendez demand the court's mercy because they are orphans" argument. Omni-obstructionists use over-the-top scaremongering and blatant barratry to force huge delays to any nuclear project, then use the long delays that they have caused themselves as an argument.
"20 years of uranium" is a bogus number that has been debunked many times. 1) 20 years proven reserves does not mean it will run out in 20 years. 2) That's 20 years proven reserves assuming the current insanely wasteful "once-through, throw most of the fuel away" fuel non-cycle. Reprocess the wastes, and the proven reserves goes up vastly. 3) That's also assuming that breeder reactors will be forever banned. Add breeders to the mix, and that's another huge boost to proven reserves. 4) Thorium reactors. According to the CRC handbook, thorium is about as common as lead, and "There is probably more energy available from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels combined." And finally, 5) back in the 1970s, Japan demonstrated an ion exchange process to extract uranium from sea water at a cost of about $100/pound in 1970 dollars. That's expensive... but you get enough energy out of fission that it would make sense if there were no other source.
It's pretty easy to verify that Gingrich has been a "space nut" for a very long time. This isn't a one-time "pander to the folks in Central Florida" thing. He read Jerry Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out" back in the 80s, and was sufficiently interested by it to contact Pournelle personally to discuss the ideas in it.
(Rants about Pournelle's politics, Gingrich's politics, are entirely beside the point I'm making here.)
<voice=AdamSavage>Well, there's your problem right there!</voice>
Not to defend Newt's record of marital fidelity, which is pretty horrible, but you don't help the case when you inflate that horrible record with things that are not true.
"Dying of cancer".... No. Jackie Battley is still alive, actually. And regarding the "serving divorce papers in the hospital" thing, Newt's daughter by that first wife says "I was there. It did not happen."
The devil is always in the details...
There are real problems and dangers that this proposal is (for public consumption, at least) intended to address. However, what comes out at the end of the process worries me. Some of these things, in the past, have ended up with wording to ensure that only goverments and "Big Aerospace" companies under contract to governments are permitted to do anything in space. (Thinking about the "Moon Treaty", for instance.)
"Big Aerospace" is perfectly happy for cost-to-orbit to remain astronomical. Cheap, routine access to space is never going to come from them, the only chance for it is companies like Space-X, Scaled Composits, X-COR, etc. "Big Aerospace" would like nothing better than to to guarantee that these companies are shut out, forever.
The 30-year-old Fukushima Daini plants, hit by the same earthquake, and a biggger tsunami, shut down safely.
At a previous employer, which used SAP, it not only required you to run IE and only IE. It not only required you to allow Active-X. It required you to configure IE to maximum promiscuity run *ALL* Active-X without prompting. The SAP web page checked, and if you had "At least ask for permission before reaming me with Active-X" set, it wouldn't run.
It's been a few years; maybe SAP is better now. And maybe that reckless insanity was entirely the fault of whoever installed it there, not SAP's fault. It sure gave me a bad feeling about SAP, though.
Google also was blazing fast compared to the other search engines at the time, and came back with better results. Usually. The first time I used it, I left the other search engines and didn't look back. At least, not much.
The only reason I used to continue to use Altavista occasionally was when I needed its "word1 near word2" search capability. I often miss the absence of that feature on Google. (I haven't even gone to altavista.com in years, though... I just checked now, and it's still there, though apparently it's part of Yahoo now.)
So if Al-Qaeeda starts developing undersea technology, you know what they're after.
Osama bin Ladin's body?
I seem to recall 6,000 lbs, but your point is accurate - most cars and light duty pickups and all but the biggest SUVs will fall into that range. Basically puts a line where trucks like the F150 will count, but the heavy "work trucks" (F250/350) are exempt.
Politicians are, in general, perfectly ignorant of basic physics, and firmly believe the laws of physics are subject to government regulation. King Canute lives!
So, what's going to happen is, if Ford can't meet the new CAFE standard with the F150 in the fleet, they'll simply quit making it, and the people who wanted an F150 will buy an F250 instead. Just like what really caused the SUV boom -- many of the people who buy them really want and need a station wagon, but the auto makers couldn't meet the CAFE standard with station wagons in the fleet, so they quit making them, and people who needed the capacity of a station wagon were forced into much less fuel-efficient vans, mini-vans, or SUVs instead.
The other thing that will happen is, the new cars will be much less car for much more money. People will be much more inclined to just keep driving their old clunker, or buy a used car.
In a debate on TED talks, taking the pro-nuclear side, Stuart Brand said something that sums up the whole thing: "I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."
The anti-nukes keep making assertions about how we "don't need nuclear or fossil fuels" that are violations of basic arithmetic.
Assuming we're to be permitted to continue having a technological civilization, of course, which is not, perhaps, a given.
Power reactors do not produce plutonium for bombs. A power reactor fuel cycle produces plutonium that contains a substantial percentage of the isotopes Pu240 and Pu242. These are fine for reactor fuel, but they have a high spontaneous fission rate, which makes them very bad for bombs. (Hint: Neither India nor Pakistan used plutonium from their power reactors to make their bombs -- they both went to the great trouble and expense of building special-purpose breeder reactors. Ask yourself why.)
TFA has been melted into slag by slashdotting, so maybe the author covered this, but I wonder what, exactly, is meant by "intellectual"? A lot of what passes for it has less to do with rational works of the intellect than with currently trendy fashions among those who pat themselves on the back for being "intellectuals."
Geeks tend to not go along with that sort of crowd. (They have their own sorts of crowds.)
(LCD as in Lowest Common Denominator)
I would love to see some channels aimed at intelligent niche markets. Unfortunately, every channel tries to go for the same lowest common denominator market as every other channel. I was really excited when I heard that there was going to be a Sci Fi Channel. The reality was ... disappointing, but there was good stuff on it occasionally. At first. But they cancelled everything good to make more room for brain-rotting abominations like wrestling and psychics. Actual science fiction is on other channels.
If they go pay, they would have to put some real science fiction on it that generated a lot of positive buzz before I'd even consider looking into what they're offering. I think the odds of that happening are as close to zero as makes no difference. "Ca
I've used both pwsafe and KeePass... I never cared for KeePass, and had just moved all my passwords back to pwsafe when I found out about LastPass, got convinced it was "secure enough" by Steve Gibson, and never looked back.
The big deal for me at the time, once past the "secure enough" thing, was that pwsafe was Windows only. KeePass did not have a means of syncing passwords that might be changed on multiple machines. Even with pwsafe, I had to carry my database around and sync it with my other machines by hand, and they were constantly getting out of sync.
LastPass keeps passwords up to date on every machine you use it on. It's just about every platform -- every platform I have wanted to use it on, anyway; Windows, Mac, Linux, Android.
I don't see any reason to give up on them due to this -- they seem to me to be acting with an excess of paranoia. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, given their product... nothing wrong with it at all.) And I certainly do not have a password that would easily be brute-forced -- annoyingly long, with numbers, mixed case, and punctuation.
Dang, I sure hope they figure out this was a false alarm and rescind the "you must change your password" thing. I spent a lot of time working on this very secure password that I won't forget.
Complain to the advertisers whose wares are being touted on these bogus pages. Let them know that Mediacom's fraudulent search pages reflect badly on them.
Most people just believe what "Science Journalists" (who are journalists, not scientists) tell them about science. The state of "Science Journalism" is generally pretty exasperating for those who know anything about whatever subject they're writing about today.
I have done the Millikan Oil Drop experiment myself. I did not get very good results, but I have no doubt that Millikan (or the graduate students working for him) got the results claimed. His apparatus was probably in better condition, with the optics not smeared with the oil from all the other students trying to get through that physics lab in the lab time allotted for it. (I'm reasonably confidant that the 1/3 charge I saw on one oil drop was experimental error.)
You are setting up a straw man yourself. Their claim is not simply that Jesus existed but that he was the "son of god" come to earth and that he "died for our sins". Their claim is that he was a deity, for which there is NO credible evidence of any kind anywhere..
The whole of Christianity hinges on the Resurrection: whether that tomb really was empty the Sunday after that Passover.
There's pretty good reason to believe that, at least, something unusual happened -- Paul wouldn't have used the argument "Some of you were eye-witnesses to these events" in his letters if he didn't think "these events" supported what he was preaching. (He was writing his letters for particular people at the time, not for us 2000 years later.)
Yeah, yeah, ho hum, another story that his the nets on April ... 6?
Huh?
Checks date again.
Not April 1. Still says April 6.
<boggle>
I remember a couple of Tom Baker ones -- one, he uses a rubber ball to propel himself from one spacecraft to the other. Throws it at the ship he's leaving, catches it on the bounce, throws it back... until he gains enough velocity to get to the other ship. (It was a plot point that Time Lords can survive in vacuum for a while.)
Another one, on a planet with a methane atmosphere, Baker's Doctor needs to set off an explosion. He does it by opening the valves on some oxygen tanks. That's the sort of "reversal of what you'd expect on Earth" thing that Asimov did in a few of his stories.
And ... forgetting the name of Baker's successor ... there was a signal they needed to figure out what it was, and the math genius kid Adric said "Oh, I can just do a Fourier analysis on this!" In a context where that actually made sense.
Don't expect it to be rigorous science fiction, though. As someone else said, it's "science fantasy", often with the emphasis on "fantasy." They never let consistency get in the way of the story they want to tell. I haven't seen those episodes, but I'm told there were four separate, and completely inconsistent with each other, episodes set at the Sinking of Atlantis. And in the reboot, how can "Gallifrey is destroyed, I am the last Timelord," matter if he is, you know, a *TIME TRAVELLER*, who in the old series, traveled far in the future of anything shown in the new series.
To a greater or lesser extent, you have to turn part of your brain off. But it can be fun. I used to watch it, but kind of lost interest at some point.
Right... I don't see how anyone pretending to know anything about the history of the computer virus phenomenon could fail to mention the Pakistani Brain Virus.
What Stuxnet targets is pretty well known -- the controllers for those uranium isotope separating centrifuges. It changes the speed to physically damage them. The reporter didn't even attempt to pretend that he'd done his homework.
It looks like whoever's behind "Courage to Resist" might be using the whole Bradley Manning thing to change PayPal's long-standing policy on linking bank accounts.
I've never had a bank account linked to my PayPal, but I've never used it to receive money, just to buy stuff. There is, I think I recall, some dollar limit at which point they'll say "you can't use PayPal any more until you give us a bank account", but I don't seem to have hit it yet. (I think it was $10,000? If so, it'll be decades.)
Maybe the thing people need to investigate is why this so-called "Courage to Resist" refuses to work with PayPal the way PayPal has always required.