One would think that, like filing cabinets, desks, etc., functions like email and document storage would converge into something very durable and unchanging. Instead we've accepted the notion that software vendors should throw it all away with each version update and start over, rather than patch and maintain software so that it converges into something better with each update.
In addition fundemental things can change drastically between different versions.
If, going forward all the plants were of an identical design...wouldn't that make things a bit simpler? Right now it seems the goal is to keep these ancient dinasaur reactors running (which does make short-term economic sense...). But wouldn't a more "monolithic", unified set design standard cut costs and ensure things were safer?
Or it might make things less safe if a flaw was discovered in the design in the future.
Or the new ones are too pessimistic and rely on theoretical possibilities that never can or will come true in reality, but we choose to err on the side of caution.
Assuming they don't also overlook more common/mundane risks. Or, even worst, attempt "risk assessment" by some kind of "box ticking".
Chernobyl dumped 5% of the reactor core materials, one million cancer deaths were predicted, it's been 25 years, why can't the anti nuclear pundits produce a scientific peer review study showing at least one hundred thousand actual deaths ?????
The process of "peer review" dosn't in itself make a study correct. Especially where this issue is mixed in with politics. When tends to be the case with "X causes Y premature deaths". All too easy for any study to be an attempt at "proof"... Best to be able to see the bodies or at least the death certificates.
As for Fukushima. Fukushima is the story of a freak Tsunami that was mutated by the anti-nuke community into a "nuclear failure".
Assuming that the "anti-nuke community" didn't contribute to the problem by making it more difficult to replace the old reactors an/or move spent fuel off site.
how do you deal with the inevitable "Hey, you're in my seat" dilemma?
Not all airlines assign specific seats to specific passengers. Some even charge for specific seats. A more obvious question would be if the crews do a "head count" or not.
Wonder if the article the article should have said "Schengen Area" rather than EU.
However, I can easily see why a Chromebook is cheaper in a corporate environment, assuming it can run all your software. They're nearly zero-effort to deploy (just log in once using an admin account and it auto-provisions), self-update automatically, don't need antivirus, already have full-disk encryption and secure boot, and Google handles all the identity management.
Having a third party manage things has it's own set of associated risks. Which may be poorly understood/managed if this is a radical change of paradigm. Also "full-disk encryption" is pointless on a device which isn't storing data. A critical factor is how easy is corporate management with Chromebooks. Including can it be done using servers you control...
The catch is that you have to be able to run EVERYTHING in Chrome.
Other issues include do you want Google (and their "friends") looking over what you are doing? Can loss of Internet connectivity (or a server on the other side of the planet) inhibit you ability to do anything, even where your LAN/WAN/VPN may be perfectly functional? (Including in cases where you havn't outsourced your data.)
backs up everything important offsite automatically, auto-updates, and which is fully encrypted.
Unless you can be sure exactly where the data will be stored there can be both business and legal reasons why this is a very bad idea. Also without proper control of encryption keys (and possibly encryption methods) supposedly encrypted data may as well be in plaintext for all practical purposes.
Microsoft is far friendlier to the NSA than Google. Haven't you been reading the news?
More likely Google just has better PR than Microsoft in this respect. The only way in which Google could actually be unfriendly to the NSA would be to move to a country which the US Government couldn't argue with. The Russian Federation and PRC being about the only options here. (In which case Google would have no option but to be friendly with Russian or Chinese NSA equivalents.)
If using a Chromebook as a remote terminal, that makes sense, assuming a decent connection to Citrix. It means one less security issue (stolen/compromised laptops) to worry about. There is still security required when people have to log on, but that can be accomplished via SecurID or another 2FA system.
However unless you can divorce the chromebook from Google you have the very big security issue that device you are using as a terminal comes compromised as standard. (This would be the case with "tablets" of all kinds.)
Can these devices be "jailbroken" to ensure that they are secure? If this is possible are the sysadmins involved doing this?
Why do they continue to beat this dead-horse. Everyone knows its complete and utter BS. It's been proven to be BS by several studies - yet the media continues to trumpet it for those too young to remember all of the hulabuloo about the Impending Ice-Age back in the 70's - now instead of "Global Warming" it's "Climate Change"
Interestingly if you dust off a gloom and doom report from the 1970s you can even find some similar trhings to in the modern versions. Though IIRC some of the same people are involved.
- well, the climate had been changing for the last 4.3 billion years and will continue to do so without any help from humans.
If anyone deserves the title of "denier" it's those who deny that Earth's climate has always changed, sometimes very radically, long before there were any humans around.
We are like a pimple on an ant's butt... When it comes to our effect on how, when, and to what extent the climate will change...
Humans certainly can change local weather and thus have some effect on climate systems. So do many other animals. Diverting rivers or building cities are far more likely top human significent human activities though.
My response is "Prove it".
Their response "The dog ate my data"
Or they'll just refuse to let anyone outside their "club" see all of the relevent data. Something which looks less like "science" and more like "religion".
I don't have to set an alarm and I still hate that damn time change. There's no reason for it anymore. Thanks to lights on tractors and a GPS system that actually steers the harvester, farmers can work all night if necessary.
The requirement to mess with clocks twice a year didn't come from agriculture in the first place. WIth many activities on farms continuing to use actual local time even after the establishment of "timezones".
The concept is far more recent. IIRC it only started in the 20th century.
All yeast dies off from alcohol at some level. If this is a serious commercial adjustment to the organism then I would be working on increasing alcohol tolerance. This would give better yields for the distillers and new wine and beer/ale/mead concoctions that will be ass kicking,
His parting comment was that because of the way the statistics were collected, this would almost certainly go down as an alcohol related accident even though the driver (me) was not intoxicated.
X related is a very vague term anyway. Possibly you could describe a fuel leak as "alcohol related", considering how much ethonol may be present.
Best first do something about the methods big business uses to avoid actually paying taxes. Otherwise churches probably still won't pay much in the way of taxes.
As for these supposed Russian commandos... I really doubt they are what the report says they are. Whenever you send agents (either Spies or Commandos) into the field you strip them of anything that would identify them as spies/commandos, having ID cards for "Spetsnaz" sounds like a plant to me.
Or a "false flag". Another possibility would be that these people are in the employ of a country not officially involved the the conflict.
But in what patterns does it get redistributed? Does it get diluted down to homeopathic levels thus curing everyone in the Ukraine of cancer, or does it get redistributed in concentrated form, creating pockets of high radiation outside the exclusion zone causing Ukrainians to get superpowers and kick the Russians out of Crimea.
If the latter will they stop with the Russian Federation or will they decide to invade Eastern Europe?
For Microsoft's *intended* use case (where you use the Store to get apps, simultaneously limiting your exposure to malware, having one place you can find the tools you need for your tasks, and giving MS a cut of every "purchase" [in quotes because DRM]), the Surface and Surface Pro do generally run the same applications.
An app store may protect against non-Microsoft (approved) malware. But it will do the exact opposite with malware Microsoft (Apple or Google) either approves of or is being paid to diastribute. Even if you don't consider DRM to be malware there is still the NSA (and "friends") to look out for.
The tendency of Firefox to preserve its own DNS cach means I cannot use it when hopping from VPN to VPN with split DNS running. unless I configure and install my _own_ local DNS server to auto-reconfigure every time I activate a VPN. I'm afraid it's become unusable for me for real work and testing when switching from internal to external website access as I debug network and configuration issues: it's the only browser that fails this way.
It's generally a bad idea for applications to be caching DNS at all. (Or for that matter "poking their noses" into anything which is an really an OS function.) The resolver library will almost always do a far better job. Including handling link level changes. In the few cases where it dosn't it's the resolver library which needs fixing anyway.
So my suggestion is that, if you really want to see a jump in math skills, start placing more emphasis on learning the concepts and less emphasis on how fast students can process problems. Allow students unlimited time on tests if they want it (maybe give them the option of taking tests after school instead of in class). It will give a lot of students like me a lot more confidence in themselves once they realize that they're not fucking stupid or "just bad at math"--that they're just slower, more deliberate, and more thoughtful.
Timed tests are common with many subjects. You'd have to make some radical changes to education to eliminate them.
A lot of green power sources like wind are only usable for peak load generation, why not use unclaimed power for feeding seawater desalination? California has something in excess of 3GW of wind power and a rough figure of 14kWH/kgal of Pacific Ocean desalination.
Can you run a desalination plant using a power source where the output varies at random? That's always been the fundermental issue with wind power.
There are calls to have people who dispute or are sceptical of certain "consensus" paradigms thrown out of their jobs, of their institutions and in some cases tried as criminals.
Which is not unlike the way political and religious authorities have treated "hertics" in the past.
Too often I see arguments and rhetoric where the person advocates AGW mitigation if the whole argument up to rationalizations for CO2 emission reduction were as strong as the relatively strong evidence and models for some degree of AGW
Often also ignoring such issues as how well do the models agree with actual observations. Along with if the "mitigation" will actually do much. It isn't unkonwn for wind and solar power generation to have a higher "carbon footprint" than regular fossil fuel plants.
Slashdot Mirror
One would think that, like filing cabinets, desks, etc., functions like email and document storage would converge into something very durable and unchanging. Instead we've accepted the notion that software vendors should throw it all away with each version update and start over, rather than patch and maintain software so that it converges into something better with each update.
In addition fundemental things can change drastically between different versions.
If, going forward all the plants were of an identical design...wouldn't that make things a bit simpler? Right now it seems the goal is to keep these ancient dinasaur reactors running (which does make short-term economic sense...). But wouldn't a more "monolithic", unified set design standard cut costs and ensure things were safer?
Or it might make things less safe if a flaw was discovered in the design in the future.
Or the new ones are too pessimistic and rely on theoretical possibilities that never can or will come true in reality, but we choose to err on the side of caution.
Assuming they don't also overlook more common/mundane risks. Or, even worst, attempt "risk assessment" by some kind of "box ticking".
Chernobyl dumped 5% of the reactor core materials, one million cancer deaths were predicted, it's been 25 years, why can't the anti nuclear pundits produce a scientific peer review study showing at least one hundred thousand actual deaths ?????
The process of "peer review" dosn't in itself make a study correct. Especially where this issue is mixed in with politics. When tends to be the case with "X causes Y premature deaths". All too easy for any study to be an attempt at "proof"... Best to be able to see the bodies or at least the death certificates.
As for Fukushima. Fukushima is the story of a freak Tsunami that was mutated by the anti-nuke community into a "nuclear failure".
Assuming that the "anti-nuke community" didn't contribute to the problem by making it more difficult to replace the old reactors an/or move spent fuel off site.
how do you deal with the inevitable "Hey, you're in my seat" dilemma?
Not all airlines assign specific seats to specific passengers. Some even charge for specific seats.
A more obvious question would be if the crews do a "head count" or not.
Wonder if the article the article should have said "Schengen Area" rather than EU.
However, I can easily see why a Chromebook is cheaper in a corporate environment, assuming it can run all your software. They're nearly zero-effort to deploy (just log in once using an admin account and it auto-provisions), self-update automatically, don't need antivirus, already have full-disk encryption and secure boot, and Google handles all the identity management.
Having a third party manage things has it's own set of associated risks. Which may be poorly understood/managed if this is a radical change of paradigm. Also "full-disk encryption" is pointless on a device which isn't storing data.
A critical factor is how easy is corporate management with Chromebooks. Including can it be done using servers you control...
The catch is that you have to be able to run EVERYTHING in Chrome.
Other issues include do you want Google (and their "friends") looking over what you are doing? Can loss of Internet connectivity (or a server on the other side of the planet) inhibit you ability to do anything, even where your LAN/WAN/VPN may be perfectly functional? (Including in cases where you havn't outsourced your data.)
backs up everything important offsite automatically, auto-updates, and which is fully encrypted.
Unless you can be sure exactly where the data will be stored there can be both business and legal reasons why this is a very bad idea. Also without proper control of encryption keys (and possibly encryption methods) supposedly encrypted data may as well be in plaintext for all practical purposes.
Microsoft is far friendlier to the NSA than Google. Haven't you been reading the news?
More likely Google just has better PR than Microsoft in this respect. The only way in which Google could actually be unfriendly to the NSA would be to move to a country which the US Government couldn't argue with. The Russian Federation and PRC being about the only options here. (In which case Google would have no option but to be friendly with Russian or Chinese NSA equivalents.)
If using a Chromebook as a remote terminal, that makes sense, assuming a decent connection to Citrix. It means one less security issue (stolen/compromised laptops) to worry about. There is still security required when people have to log on, but that can be accomplished via SecurID or another 2FA system.
However unless you can divorce the chromebook from Google you have the very big security issue that device you are using as a terminal comes compromised as standard. (This would be the case with "tablets" of all kinds.) Can these devices be "jailbroken" to ensure that they are secure? If this is possible are the sysadmins involved doing this?
Why do they continue to beat this dead-horse. Everyone knows its complete and utter BS. It's been proven to be BS by several studies - yet the media continues to trumpet it for those too young to remember all of the hulabuloo about the Impending Ice-Age back in the 70's - now instead of "Global Warming" it's "Climate Change"
Interestingly if you dust off a gloom and doom report from the 1970s you can even find some similar trhings to in the modern versions. Though IIRC some of the same people are involved.
- well, the climate had been changing for the last 4.3 billion years and will continue to do so without any help from humans.
If anyone deserves the title of "denier" it's those who deny that Earth's climate has always changed, sometimes very radically, long before there were any humans around.
We are like a pimple on an ant's butt... When it comes to our effect on how, when, and to what extent the climate will change...
Humans certainly can change local weather and thus have some effect on climate systems. So do many other animals. Diverting rivers or building cities are far more likely top human significent human activities though.
My response is "Prove it".
Their response "The dog ate my data"
Or they'll just refuse to let anyone outside their "club" see all of the relevent data. Something which looks less like "science" and more like "religion".
I don't have to set an alarm and I still hate that damn time change. There's no reason for it anymore. Thanks to lights on tractors and a GPS system that actually steers the harvester, farmers can work all night if necessary.
The requirement to mess with clocks twice a year didn't come from agriculture in the first place. WIth many activities on farms continuing to use actual local time even after the establishment of "timezones". The concept is far more recent. IIRC it only started in the 20th century.
All yeast dies off from alcohol at some level. If this is a serious commercial adjustment to the organism then I would be working on increasing alcohol tolerance. This would give better yields for the distillers and new wine and beer/ale/mead concoctions that will be ass kicking,
Adding an amylase gene might also help.
His parting comment was that because of the way the statistics were collected, this would almost certainly go down as an alcohol related accident even though the driver (me) was not intoxicated.
X related is a very vague term anyway. Possibly you could describe a fuel leak as "alcohol related", considering how much ethonol may be present.
I'd rather have equal taxation for churches.
Best first do something about the methods big business uses to avoid actually paying taxes. Otherwise churches probably still won't pay much in the way of taxes.
As for these supposed Russian commandos... I really doubt they are what the report says they are. Whenever you send agents (either Spies or Commandos) into the field you strip them of anything that would identify them as spies/commandos, having ID cards for "Spetsnaz" sounds like a plant to me.
Or a "false flag". Another possibility would be that these people are in the employ of a country not officially involved the the conflict.
But in what patterns does it get redistributed? Does it get diluted down to homeopathic levels thus curing everyone in the Ukraine of cancer, or does it get redistributed in concentrated form, creating pockets of high radiation outside the exclusion zone causing Ukrainians to get superpowers and kick the Russians out of Crimea.
If the latter will they stop with the Russian Federation or will they decide to invade Eastern Europe?
I want a flying car that folds into a briefcase like George Jetson.
Inch High: Private Eye is another Hana Barbara cartoon which depicted "modern technology" long before it came into common usage.
I don't mean this to be a Debbie Downer, but...This is not a briefcase, it's just made to look like one.
It's a folding bike. So it would make more sense to compare it with other folding bikes. Both pedal and electric...
For Microsoft's *intended* use case (where you use the Store to get apps, simultaneously limiting your exposure to malware, having one place you can find the tools you need for your tasks, and giving MS a cut of every "purchase" [in quotes because DRM]), the Surface and Surface Pro do generally run the same applications.
An app store may protect against non-Microsoft (approved) malware. But it will do the exact opposite with malware Microsoft (Apple or Google) either approves of or is being paid to diastribute. Even if you don't consider DRM to be malware there is still the NSA (and "friends") to look out for.
The tendency of Firefox to preserve its own DNS cach means I cannot use it when hopping from VPN to VPN with split DNS running. unless I configure and install my _own_ local DNS server to auto-reconfigure every time I activate a VPN. I'm afraid it's become unusable for me for real work and testing when switching from internal to external website access as I debug network and configuration issues: it's the only browser that fails this way.
It's generally a bad idea for applications to be caching DNS at all. (Or for that matter "poking their noses" into anything which is an really an OS function.) The resolver library will almost always do a far better job. Including handling link level changes. In the few cases where it dosn't it's the resolver library which needs fixing anyway.
So my suggestion is that, if you really want to see a jump in math skills, start placing more emphasis on learning the concepts and less emphasis on how fast students can process problems. Allow students unlimited time on tests if they want it (maybe give them the option of taking tests after school instead of in class). It will give a lot of students like me a lot more confidence in themselves once they realize that they're not fucking stupid or "just bad at math"--that they're just slower, more deliberate, and more thoughtful.
Timed tests are common with many subjects. You'd have to make some radical changes to education to eliminate them.
A lot of green power sources like wind are only usable for peak load generation, why not use unclaimed power for feeding seawater desalination? California has something in excess of 3GW of wind power and a rough figure of 14kWH/kgal of Pacific Ocean desalination.
Can you run a desalination plant using a power source where the output varies at random? That's always been the fundermental issue with wind power.
There are calls to have people who dispute or are sceptical of certain "consensus" paradigms thrown out of their jobs, of their institutions and in some cases tried as criminals.
Which is not unlike the way political and religious authorities have treated "hertics" in the past.
Too often I see arguments and rhetoric where the person advocates AGW mitigation if the whole argument up to rationalizations for CO2 emission reduction were as strong as the relatively strong evidence and models for some degree of AGW
Often also ignoring such issues as how well do the models agree with actual observations. Along with if the "mitigation" will actually do much. It isn't unkonwn for wind and solar power generation to have a higher "carbon footprint" than regular fossil fuel plants.