Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
Yes, you are correct. There's also enough uranium in the atmosphere right now to kill everyone with cancer.
The question is what is your 2 pounds of plutonium going to do and how well can you contain it. You basically cannot answer those questions when you're talking about launching a rocket into space. If you're instead talking about lifting it into orbit via this system, you can begin to understand the failure modes and prepare for them. You can build a containment system that will keep it from dispersing.
If that containment fails, then you have to retrieve it from the bottom of the ocean. You'll get most of it back, but some small amount will be lost in the ocean floor and an even smaller amount will be lost in the ocean.
I think you can risk a couple of grams of plutonium in the ocean. What you can't risk is sending two pounds up in a rocket that could explode in the atmosphere. That could be bad in the ghostbusters sense....
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
"It's not engergy - it's angular momentum"
Uh... yeah...
Angular momentum is angular velocity times moment of inertia. It denotes a target, but not a means. In order to apply angular momentum you must to work (which is to say we must insert energy into the system).
Hence my comments.
"You need some way of generating thrust to counteract that momentum so you can fall easily."
Ugh... that's a real bastardization of the forces involved. Let's state that more clearly: there are a number of vectors involved, and you need to alter the sum of those vectors so that your new trajectory intersects the sun.
"If you want something that doesn't require propellant"
Why would you not want propellant? I was just suggesting that you'd get the energy from the sun, not that you wouldn't involve components from the earth in your drive. Ion drives using a solar-fueled fusion engine have been on the theoretical drawing boards for a long time, but AFAIK no one has put a whole lot of work into testing them. That might be the way to go. There are several electrical mechanisms that have been proposed as well, but they all involve some sort of propellant.
Then there's the ground-based laser idea, but even that could be powered by the sun.
The point is that getting into orbit cheaply and safely eliminates a huge portion of the constraint that makes space-based nuclear waste disposal less than attractive.
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
Correction: it would require a huge amount of energy. Given that you're trying to fly into the largest producer of energy in the local area, it's just a matter of producing an engine that a) can use that energy efficiently enough to get into the right trajectory and b) making it cheap enough that it doesn't cost billions per shipment.
The other nice thing about the elevator is that it removes a lot of the danger of throwing waste materials into space. The big concern when you're throwing tons of plutoniom, for example, into space is that the launch vehicle might fail and fall to earth. With this scheme, you can afford to send many more, much smaller payloads up. If you drop 2 pounds of plutonium into the ocean, it's a bad thing, but it's a managable risk. It's also much less likely to happen, as the largest chunk of risk is when you put the elevator up, not when you use it!
This is a deflection, not an answer. The question was about your assertion that the majority of Lawyers in DC work for Microsoft. I am willing to believe that they have more lawyers in DC than any other single software company. That seems reasonable given that MS is the largest software company in the country.
However, to assert that there are more MS lawyers than congressional lawers plus USDoJ lawers, plus environmental lawers, etc, etc, etc... MS would have to spend all of their revenue several times over!
What they mean is that they are going to go from offering "hardware A, available as model B, with option C" to "hardware A available as model D which is available only with option C"
Bascially, the contract with MS says that they can't get the OEM price unless they sell the model in question with only MS products. So, they have to create another "model" which they ship without an OS. The obfuscation in the letter is designed to avoid outright saying that they're using the word of the contract against MS, so that MS can't say in court that Dell violated the contract in spirit (I'm not sure how defensible that would be, but if I were Dell, I'd avoid it too).
Assuming America has a "monopoly" on abusive potical, technical, or jurisprudence wrt to the net isn't a logical fallacy, it is a factual fallacy. The logic is sound, the assumption made upon which the argument is based is what is inaccurate.
You're correct the article was poorly phrased. It should have been stated, "Of course, there's a fallacy in this. The case is made against the US, but never for Europe."
In terms of the logical fallacies, I guess this would be Argumentum ad novitatem, but it's a hard call. But it's also a bit of a red herring in that you're claiming "not a" and then holding that that implies "b". "not a", or in this case, "the US is corrupt" has nothign to do with "b", or in the case, "europe isn't".
I can't wait for the Linux kernel module that listens for this things traffic, DNATs the connection to itself, forges the correct "you can view" responses and then SNATs back a response... Once the DRM software is reverse engineered, the nat module (or DRM proxy, if you will) should be a very quick hack.
Even if there's very little chance of doing it right, those are odds that the Europeans should take. They're being treated like crap right now, and that has to stop. At least if they're being treated like crap by their own people, they have a chance to address it.
And who knows, perhaps the best case scenario will come true.
Perl has some handy features in this respect. It's a nice high-level language in its own right, and the Perl Data Language module (PDL) provides access to some very nice numerical and binary data libraries including some that are written in FORTRAN.
I know Perl seems too high level at first, but give PDL a try. It's well worth the investment of time to get to know it.
I'm a little confused by this. TiVo has reserved the right in their agreements to share non-specific demographic information with any party they choose (for example, they are allowed to say "10,000 homes in Oregon watched last night's A-Team episode within 1 hour of its airing." While they would not be allowed to say "Joe Frump watch the first 10 minutes of A-Team, but then switched to Dukes of Hazard."
So, I don't see why Neilsen couldn't just take the statistics from TiVo for every household and be done with it.
What really frustrates me is that I submitted this story a week ago. It showed up in a CBSMakrketWatch article about AOL. This is not the old AOL president. He's just started recently, and that's why he's willing to try out some radical changes like this.
Debugging problems that you're aware of is one thing, and yes I just print status messages to find that kind of problem most of the time too. Memory checkers are more useful for finding the kinds of bugs that you don't know are there. It's a sanity check, if you will. If you run one, and it doesn't find anything, all the better!
No, that was not my point. The point was that if you stand in a room full of Slashdotters and scream "screw the MPAA!" you'll get a bunch of shouts in support, but an hour later the topic will turn to what movie everyone's waiting for the most.
If, on the other hand I walk into that same room and say "lets all get together and go see "Death Star D00dz!" in two weeks, I'll get some takers who would have otherwise seen it this weekend. I've taken a little money out of the RIAA's pocket instead of none, and in my book that's a win.
Now, if they weren't going to go see "Death Star D00dz!" anyway I've lost, but if I pick the right film I can pretty much guarantee that that's not the case (the percentage of Slashdotters who didn't see Lord of the Rings in theaters could be a topic of polling, but I'm willing to bet it would tie Cowboy Neil).
You can cripple the MPAA and see every movie they release in a good theater with THX/Dolby/whatevertheheck sound. You can boycott every movie for the next 6 years and still see all of them!
What's that you say? How can that be?
Simply wait until the movie has been out 2 weeks and go to a matinee on the third week. It's that easy. If enough people do this we can cripple the movie industry and trash their stuck value BECAUSE they calculate the success of a movie and estimate profitability based on opening weekend returns!
As a test, I'm hereby calling for a 2-week boycott of the movie "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers". I'm calling it the "Boycott of the Rings: The Two Weeks". I will organize a group viewing during christmas week for anyone in my company, familly and circle of friends that wants to join me. We'll go to the Boston Common Lowes theater in Boston, MA at the closest showing after 2PM on Monday, December 30, 2002. Feel free to join us, and if you wish to wear a shirt, button or other apparel that displays your disgust for the MPAA, RIAA and whatnot all else, I invite you to do so, but please don't buy tickets for any showing before this or any full-priced showing after.
I figure if we're going to be lazy enough to not boycott the people who are trying to give us the shaft, we might as well pick a movie that a) won't benefit from the extra publicity among geeks b) will have its sequel no matter what we do and c) will hurt the upcoming largest movie season of the year!
Presumably you would get around that in software by using a journal on the write side and then doing all of your journal commits atomically. Then on the read side you would ignore the journal and just look at the commited portion of the disk. That should give you a consistant if slightly outdated image on the read side.
Yes indeed, this is a complicated, sure-to-cause-more-problems-than-it-solves solution to a non-problem. Export filesystems read-only to your static Web servers and read-write to your back-end thinkers (DB servers, content management systems, etc).
If you're really smart, you're doing all of this on a netapp filer so that the access speed is as good as or better than local-attached storage (and, yes that's true even though it sounds wacked... it's because of thier NVRAM-based journaling filesystem for which their NFS server code is hand-tuned).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you are correct. There's also enough uranium in the atmosphere right now to kill everyone with cancer.
The question is what is your 2 pounds of plutonium going to do and how well can you contain it. You basically cannot answer those questions when you're talking about launching a rocket into space. If you're instead talking about lifting it into orbit via this system, you can begin to understand the failure modes and prepare for them. You can build a containment system that will keep it from dispersing.
If that containment fails, then you have to retrieve it from the bottom of the ocean. You'll get most of it back, but some small amount will be lost in the ocean floor and an even smaller amount will be lost in the ocean.
I think you can risk a couple of grams of plutonium in the ocean. What you can't risk is sending two pounds up in a rocket that could explode in the atmosphere. That could be bad in the ghostbusters sense....
"It's not engergy - it's angular momentum"
Uh... yeah...
Angular momentum is angular velocity times moment of inertia. It denotes a target, but not a means. In order to apply angular momentum you must to work (which is to say we must insert energy into the system).
Hence my comments.
"You need some way of generating thrust to counteract that momentum so you can fall easily."
Ugh... that's a real bastardization of the forces involved. Let's state that more clearly: there are a number of vectors involved, and you need to alter the sum of those vectors so that your new trajectory intersects the sun.
"If you want something that doesn't require propellant"
Why would you not want propellant? I was just suggesting that you'd get the energy from the sun, not that you wouldn't involve components from the earth in your drive. Ion drives using a solar-fueled fusion engine have been on the theoretical drawing boards for a long time, but AFAIK no one has put a whole lot of work into testing them. That might be the way to go. There are several electrical mechanisms that have been proposed as well, but they all involve some sort of propellant.
Then there's the ground-based laser idea, but even that could be powered by the sun.
The point is that getting into orbit cheaply and safely eliminates a huge portion of the constraint that makes space-based nuclear waste disposal less than attractive.
Correction: it would require a huge amount of energy. Given that you're trying to fly into the largest producer of energy in the local area, it's just a matter of producing an engine that a) can use that energy efficiently enough to get into the right trajectory and b) making it cheap enough that it doesn't cost billions per shipment.
The other nice thing about the elevator is that it removes a lot of the danger of throwing waste materials into space. The big concern when you're throwing tons of plutoniom, for example, into space is that the launch vehicle might fail and fall to earth. With this scheme, you can afford to send many more, much smaller payloads up. If you drop 2 pounds of plutonium into the ocean, it's a bad thing, but it's a managable risk. It's also much less likely to happen, as the largest chunk of risk is when you put the elevator up, not when you use it!
This is a deflection, not an answer. The question was about your assertion that the majority of Lawyers in DC work for Microsoft. I am willing to believe that they have more lawyers in DC than any other single software company. That seems reasonable given that MS is the largest software company in the country.
However, to assert that there are more MS lawyers than congressional lawers plus USDoJ lawers, plus environmental lawers, etc, etc, etc... MS would have to spend all of their revenue several times over!
Get some facts.
What they mean is that they are going to go from offering "hardware A, available as model B, with option C" to "hardware A available as model D which is available only with option C"
Bascially, the contract with MS says that they can't get the OEM price unless they sell the model in question with only MS products. So, they have to create another "model" which they ship without an OS. The obfuscation in the letter is designed to avoid outright saying that they're using the word of the contract against MS, so that MS can't say in court that Dell violated the contract in spirit (I'm not sure how defensible that would be, but if I were Dell, I'd avoid it too).
Assuming America has a "monopoly" on abusive potical, technical, or jurisprudence wrt to the net isn't a logical fallacy, it is a factual fallacy. The logic is sound, the assumption made upon which the argument is based is what is inaccurate.
You're correct the article was poorly phrased. It should have been stated, "Of course, there's a fallacy in this. The case is made against the US, but never for Europe."
In terms of the logical fallacies, I guess this would be Argumentum ad novitatem, but it's a hard call. But it's also a bit of a red herring in that you're claiming "not a" and then holding that that implies "b". "not a", or in this case, "the US is corrupt" has nothign to do with "b", or in the case, "europe isn't".
I can't wait for the Linux kernel module that listens for this things traffic, DNATs the connection to itself, forges the correct "you can view" responses and then SNATs back a response... Once the DRM software is reverse engineered, the nat module (or DRM proxy, if you will) should be a very quick hack.
Even if there's very little chance of doing it right, those are odds that the Europeans should take. They're being treated like crap right now, and that has to stop. At least if they're being treated like crap by their own people, they have a chance to address it.
And who knows, perhaps the best case scenario will come true.
You don't sue under the DMCA. You press charges. Different.
This is why Adobe could back out of the Skylorov (sp?) case, but the FBI still went ahead with it. Adobe was just the one that told the authorities.
Clearly, you've never used PDL. Go try it out, and then we can talk.
Perl has some handy features in this respect. It's a nice high-level language in its own right, and the Perl Data Language module (PDL) provides access to some very nice numerical and binary data libraries including some that are written in FORTRAN.
I know Perl seems too high level at first, but give PDL a try. It's well worth the investment of time to get to know it.
There's something about responding to pages from a cranky datacenter while reading an article like this... it just takes me back. :-)
I'm a little confused by this. TiVo has reserved the right in their agreements to share non-specific demographic information with any party they choose (for example, they are allowed to say "10,000 homes in Oregon watched last night's A-Team episode within 1 hour of its airing." While they would not be allowed to say "Joe Frump watch the first 10 minutes of A-Team, but then switched to Dukes of Hazard."
So, I don't see why Neilsen couldn't just take the statistics from TiVo for every household and be done with it.
What really frustrates me is that I submitted this story a week ago. It showed up in a CBSMakrketWatch article about AOL. This is not the old AOL president. He's just started recently, and that's why he's willing to try out some radical changes like this.
Yeah, if we could just get Microsoft and the RIAA involved.... :-)
Debugging problems that you're aware of is one thing, and yes I just print status messages to find that kind of problem most of the time too. Memory checkers are more useful for finding the kinds of bugs that you don't know are there. It's a sanity check, if you will. If you run one, and it doesn't find anything, all the better!
stop forwarding around 3meg powerpoint attachments comprised of dilbert comics
NOOOOO!!! Not my 3MB Dilbert Power-Points! Do you know what impact that will have on my productivity as sanitation engineer?!
even that is too hard and unnecessary!
What, going to see a movie is hard? Or are you refering to wearing a T-shirt? That was optional. You do have to wear something, though.
No, that was not my point. The point was that if you stand in a room full of Slashdotters and scream "screw the MPAA!" you'll get a bunch of shouts in support, but an hour later the topic will turn to what movie everyone's waiting for the most.
If, on the other hand I walk into that same room and say "lets all get together and go see "Death Star D00dz!" in two weeks, I'll get some takers who would have otherwise seen it this weekend. I've taken a little money out of the RIAA's pocket instead of none, and in my book that's a win.
Now, if they weren't going to go see "Death Star D00dz!" anyway I've lost, but if I pick the right film I can pretty much guarantee that that's not the case (the percentage of Slashdotters who didn't see Lord of the Rings in theaters could be a topic of polling, but I'm willing to bet it would tie Cowboy Neil).
You can cripple the MPAA and see every movie they release in a good theater with THX/Dolby/whatevertheheck sound. You can boycott every movie for the next 6 years and still see all of them!
What's that you say? How can that be?
Simply wait until the movie has been out 2 weeks and go to a matinee on the third week. It's that easy. If enough people do this we can cripple the movie industry and trash their stuck value BECAUSE they calculate the success of a movie and estimate profitability based on opening weekend returns!
As a test, I'm hereby calling for a 2-week boycott of the movie "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers". I'm calling it the "Boycott of the Rings: The Two Weeks". I will organize a group viewing during christmas week for anyone in my company, familly and circle of friends that wants to join me. We'll go to the Boston Common Lowes theater in Boston, MA at the closest showing after 2PM on Monday, December 30, 2002. Feel free to join us, and if you wish to wear a shirt, button or other apparel that displays your disgust for the MPAA, RIAA and whatnot all else, I invite you to do so, but please don't buy tickets for any showing before this or any full-priced showing after.
I figure if we're going to be lazy enough to not boycott the people who are trying to give us the shaft, we might as well pick a movie that a) won't benefit from the extra publicity among geeks b) will have its sequel no matter what we do and c) will hurt the upcoming largest movie season of the year!
Thank you all for your support.
This is not a typo. This is illiteracy and/or ignorance.
Its illiteracy. I hate to admit it, but I never learned to reed or rite.
That's why I work with computers, so I never have
to learn two.
Thank you for pointing it out, Mr Troal.
Meanwhile, MCI/Worldcom/UUNET was dubbed "Whipping Boy of the Hour" by 17 leading pseudo-news organizations around the world.
Why is it that we pretend that such over-zealous predictions are unique?
Worldcom is in trouble so attacking them is easy: they have bigger fish to fry. If you go after Sprint this way, those bastards might sue you!
photoshop.tar.gz.uu.mp3
:)
Heh, they days of USENET binaries groups are starting to seam pleasant by comparison
Presumably you would get around that in software by using a journal on the write side and then doing all of your journal commits atomically. Then on the read side you would ignore the journal and just look at the commited portion of the disk. That should give you a consistant if slightly outdated image on the read side.
Yes indeed, this is a complicated, sure-to-cause-more-problems-than-it-solves solution to a non-problem. Export filesystems read-only to your static Web servers and read-write to your back-end thinkers (DB servers, content management systems, etc).
If you're really smart, you're doing all of this on a netapp filer so that the access speed is as good as or better than local-attached storage (and, yes that's true even though it sounds wacked... it's because of thier NVRAM-based journaling filesystem for which their NFS server code is hand-tuned).