I quit a long time ago since I'm an old fart (and a PHB).
I just quit. Programmers need solitude. While I quit, others may look for a different strategy.
It is my opinion that people tend to employ a strategy in life that they feel will help them get ahead. Most look for acceptance by the group and tend to be very gregarious. For these people, figuring out what is politically correct is the first order of business. The second order of business is to look good and fit in. Given a difficult decision to make, these people will tend to want to put it to a vote. Given a technical or scientific or mathematical problem to solve - they will tend to fall back on the strategy they know best - and will tend to try to put it to a vote AS WELL. A good example of this is the debate on global warming. Science in general and global warming in particular are not subject to public opinion. Yet look at the dimension of the political pressure that is applied on both sides of the issue.
Programmers and engineers, technical people in general, tend not to be part of this group. These people need to deal with real science, math and logic. Programs and bridges are not open to politics and popular opinion. If there is a bug in your program it will crash regardless how popular you are and being politically correct likely won't help your bridge stand up if you are an engineer. In fact, many of the disasters which have happened are due to trying to applying political solutions to technical problems. The sinking of the Titanic is probably a good example. Double hulls were in use for over 100 years and high bulkheads to fully compartamentalize the ship were also well understood. These were eliminated or compromised. Even the breakneck speed the ship was travelling at indicates a clear lack of respect for reality and the powerful, yet subtle desire to gain status in a peer group.
Managers and supervisors tend to be in the "people oriented" group. Since they see their strengths as comming from the group, they want to round everyone up (like a flock of chickens in some cases). Often they simply cannot understand that technical people cannot work in such an environment.
This is compounded by who makes the money. Sales people tend to be gregarious. Customer service people tend to be gregarious. There is a simple test one can do to confirm this.
Suppose you have an issue with say billing from a utility. Suppose you just simply refuse to pay the bill until they fix the problem. Your other option is to attempt to call them and they will put you on hold for hours and try to make you listen while their robots annoy you with elevator music.
The thing is that you cannot simply tell them "hey - you have a problem - please fix it". For some reason these people cannot seem to work unless they have you on line and are wasting your time. See the need for "personal interaction"?
Ok.. so you undertake to not let them waste your time. If you don't pay the bill - you know they will eventually have to call you up. At least you avoid most of the robots. Again - you are unlikely to be able to get them to do anything to correct your account unless you are willing to let them put you on hold.
IMHO part of the rift between the sexes falls into this area. Women have always carried the lion's share of the responsibility of raising the next generation. Babies and children need constant attention and were it not for their mother's propensity to talk, babies would propbably never learn to speak. Given this, is it such a surprise that women tend to like careers that are "people" oriented? People like this tend to view solitude as punishment, certainly not an opportunity.
Back to cubicals. The rift is that the people who manage the company and who tend to bring in the revenues via sales and marketing all tend to be "people oriented" and see their strength in the group. When they go off on their own they tend to shut down. It is di
I would be one who would want to virtualize the home version. Anyone doing development may need to do this. There are many legitimate reason - ease of debugging is one. Ease of determining how someone 0wn3d a machine is another.
CO2 actually does leave the atmosphere easily. Plants literally grow out of the air. This is where their Carbon comes from. The expected life of CO2 in the atmosphre is anywhere from 15 to about 50 years and its probably closer to the 15 than the 50.
Furthermore plants grow faster with the increase of CO2. This is proven and clearly obvious... obvious to any layman who can think and totally obvious to any intelligent biologist since they have been doing greenhouse studies on this for decades.
Since plant life growth rates increase we end up with additional CO2 stimulating plant growth and a new steady state is achieved within a couple decades. This is clearly NOT something our global warming folks want to hear... because their theories end up in the trash can unless they can constantly increase CO2 for ever and ever.
Note: Mankind's activities have clearly increased the amount of H2O in the atmosphere since we divert entire rivers via irrigation. For our climate modelers to claim that since H2O is short lived there is no net increase is the same as saying the humidifier in my house won't work since the water will be lost fairly soon after it is introduced. These ideas completely ignore the fact that H2O is being constantly pumped into the atmosphere via many mechanisms including burning fuel... irrigating lawns, running humidifiers in dry areas, and of course - wide spread irrigation.
The thing is we havn't been able to measure the H2O levels accurately. Thus people choose to wave their arms and say this effect is a "constant". To do so is to set change in the most significant variable to zero. One cannot have much faith in models which ignore the most significant variables.
Please check the wikipedia artical on the integral fast reactor and check the talk pages. You will find I wrote part of that artical.
I am fully aware of what reactor designs such as the IFR can do. It is about 2 orders of magnitude better than your esitimate and indeed, the spent fuel (which is usuable in an IFR and other advanced designs) will remain dangerous for 1000's of years, just as you said... unless it is burned and thus turned into electricity.
The public has been lied to by the pollies - again. I am trying to help spread the truth.
I live in a city that is the headquarters of most of the Canadian Oil patch. Much of what we do is funded by oil money.
Dispite this fact, there are many very impartial people who live here and I happen to be one of them.
The oil industry is very unlikely to be able to supply the oil the population would like to consume. Thus, we will be doing our part to reduce at least North American comsumption of this fossil fuel. Like it or not. The general population is not going to like the idea that within 5 years we are most likely clearly going to be past the peak of world oil production as as such - CO2 emissions from oil (and gas) consumption are going to start to fall.
So like it or not - in the very near future we likely will meet our Kyoto targets.
There may be a lot of people freezing in the dark by then.
I have posted this before. Anyone who is conserned about CO2 emissions can buy a more fuel efficient vehical, take public transportation, and insulate their house. Putting R50 in the walls can virtually eliminate the consumption of winter heating oil and natural gas. During the construction phase, beefing up the walls to R50 adds as little as $1 buk per square foot of building envelope area. It can be cheaper than installing space heating and one wins both summer and winter... with a far more comfortable home.
What would be really nice is if people could forget the politics and focus on the problem. The problem is that like it or not - within a very few years the oil age will be over.
I for one will not worry very much about CO2 rising for the next 100 years driven by man's consumption of fossil fuels (at least oil and gas) because I know damn well oil and gas will not last that long. Most likely we will be seeing a world wide reduction in oil consumption of about 5% compounding per year by 2015. North American natural gas is already past peak. Most of the North American nitrogen fertilizer industry is presently shut down as a result. I suspect the plastics feedstocks industry will be next.
6 billion people are expected to die over the next 100 years. This is an annual death rate of about 60 million which is equal to the number of people killed in WWII (roughly 62 million).
The death rate is correlated with the expected rise in temperature attributed to Global Warming.
Dr. Tim Patterson - and he is only one of many - IS ON THE OTHER SIDE and he IS A CLIMATE SCIENTIST.
He is also a very credible climate scientist.
Note: Gore is a lawyer. Note: In many trials if not most trials... one side is presenting fiction.
I for one believe OJ is innocent. But then maybe I believe his lawyers?
On this basis one can discount at least 1/2 of what lawyers say as being pure fiction whether it sounds believable or not. I tend to think the smell factor with polies is higher than 1/2 but then I'm an optimist.
Question: In a trial, how often do we find the lawyers agreeing?
Why should we expect a concensus in the debate on global warming? The sides will simply forget all about it and find something else to bicker about. Eventually a concensus will form in the scientific community. As this happens the media will ignore it because their purpose is not to convey information - it's to sell papers and advertizing.
I am reminded of a comment by one of my physics profs: Sometimes one generation has to die off. He was refering to the time it took for the physics community to accept Einstein's relativity theory.
Now that you have pointed out that only about 1% of the fuel gets burned (figure is a little low) - please calculate what fraction of the mined uranium makes it through the enrichment process?
I think you will find the overall discard rate of mined uranium is something like 99.8% But I will let you do you own numbers.
Re:Demographics is taking care of this...
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Check the demographics in the Middle East, SE Asia, the "stans, India and Africa.
I'll not do the chemistry. Its not hard. Plant biomass is a sugar polymer: (CH2O)n. When you convert it to ethanol (C2H5OH) you get an energy equivalent of about 2 barrels of oil from a tonne of dry biomass.
(I"m not talking about oils).
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day and about 2/3 is imported.
Since we really don't have cellulose -> ethanol conversion down pat (and we also need to work on pentosan's and lignans) we are going to need one hell of a lot of sugar to fill the gas tanks of North America.
I question if North America can grow enough to both feed itself and provide energy... but some are optimistic and perhaps an all out Hemp program should be undertaken. Productivity of Hemp is quite a lot higher than corn for instance.
Is Gore a climate scientist?...or any other kind of scientist?
Eh?
Science is not political and not subject to a vote
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 1
The reason you should "waste" some times is that we can't vote on climate change. It is not political. Regardless who brings the message, if the message is correct then it behoves us to pay attention to what the messenger is saying.
This "association" claimed between the "left" and the "right" reminds me of my high school math teacher's inclination to have the class "vote" on the correct answer. Math is also not subject to a "vote".
We may have climate change. But if we do it is not caused by CO2. Comparatively speaking: CO2 concentrations compared to the major green house gas is like comparing a sheet of toilet paper to a tree stump. Presence or lack of mountains is far more important for instance. There are a lot of factors. CO2 is very minor.
Dr. Tim Patterson for instance states that global temperatures and CO2 are not coupled. Patterson is paid by Carleton University which is turn is supported by two (2) governments both of whom are trying to sell Kyoto to the Canadian public. I would suggest you take his course on Paleoclimatology.
So in this case, those who are paying the salaries are not getting Patterson's support.
I am reminded of the press yapping about "Limits to Growth" in the 70's. A couple years after I graduated I happened to be wandering through the Geology Library at the UofC and found a thesis written by a grad student at the Colorado School of Mines. He discovered the Runge Kutta numerical integrations of the model used in "Limits to Growth" were often not converging. He discoved many other outright mathematical and other errors.... and published them.
Clearly the press is not all that interested in publishing facts. I've never seen a comment or retraction of the speculation surrounding "Limits to Growth" despite the fact that it has been discredited for over 30 years.
Its not news. Its a toy. It generates a few neutrons. Big deal. It's not going to become a power source. So what is this "hopefully"? Hopefully I will live forever. I would love to believe in fantacy. Alas I have to slog it out in reality.
You can contact CWI through their website. Lewis's research is pretty through and I'll advise anyone who really wants to know the truth to actually read what he has to say and think about it rather than just posting a knee jerk reaction. Lewis makes some pretty good points.
If course I expect my post will get modded down. If so - its just another knee jerk reaction by those who wish to suppress the truth rather than actually look at the data.
It is truely amasing how technically incompetant some people are. That they can walk and talk is sometimes a surprise. I sometimes think the human race has already split into two streams. If so the problem is we have the worng people running the show and there is little accountability.
If they spent $2500 pounds on average on 200 machines then imagine if only 10% of that money had been made available to technically competant people! The rest of the money could have been donated to the welfare budget.
Why can't we organise a class action against Microsoft? It is their shitty code that is responsible for most of this... their shitty code and really poorly thought out security measures.
Then we should go after some of the large ISP who hide their brains in the sand (shit anyone) and pretend they do not know certain customer's machines are spewing night and day.
Slashdot Mirror
Ya.. I've heard this happens to NMR machines too.
NG sells for about 8 bux per Gj at the moment. That is a lot of energy to waste... don't they know we have an energy crisis about to happen?
The solar panels on my friend's WestFailia produce about 50 watts. On a sunny day he might have to wait an hour or so before he can run his toaster.
Seriously - tyring to put energy units into perspective is very necessary since most people (/.'s excepted) don't have a clue.
I couldn't find "jenni". Alas!
Mod parent up!
/. because now everyone will follow your advise and we lose our competitive advantage. Alas.
Brilliant and very well said!!! To bad you posted on
I quit a long time ago since I'm an old fart (and a PHB).
I just quit. Programmers need solitude. While I quit, others may look for a different strategy.
It is my opinion that people tend to employ a strategy in life that they feel will help them get ahead. Most look for acceptance by the group and tend to be very gregarious. For these people, figuring out what is politically correct is the first order of business. The second order of business is to look good and fit in. Given a difficult decision to make, these people will tend to want to put it to a vote. Given a technical or scientific or mathematical problem to solve - they will tend to fall back on the strategy they know best - and will tend to try to put it to a vote AS WELL . A good example of this is the debate on global warming. Science in general and global warming in particular are not subject to public opinion. Yet look at the dimension of the political pressure that is applied on both sides of the issue.
Programmers and engineers, technical people in general, tend not to be part of this group. These people need to deal with real science, math and logic. Programs and bridges are not open to politics and popular opinion. If there is a bug in your program it will crash regardless how popular you are and being politically correct likely won't help your bridge stand up if you are an engineer. In fact, many of the disasters which have happened are due to trying to applying political solutions to technical problems. The sinking of the Titanic is probably a good example. Double hulls were in use for over 100 years and high bulkheads to fully compartamentalize the ship were also well understood. These were eliminated or compromised. Even the breakneck speed the ship was travelling at indicates a clear lack of respect for reality and the powerful, yet subtle desire to gain status in a peer group.
Managers and supervisors tend to be in the "people oriented" group. Since they see their strengths as comming from the group, they want to round everyone up (like a flock of chickens in some cases). Often they simply cannot understand that technical people cannot work in such an environment.
This is compounded by who makes the money. Sales people tend to be gregarious. Customer service people tend to be gregarious. There is a simple test one can do to confirm this.
Suppose you have an issue with say billing from a utility. Suppose you just simply refuse to pay the bill until they fix the problem. Your other option is to attempt to call them and they will put you on hold for hours and try to make you listen while their robots annoy you with elevator music.
The thing is that you cannot simply tell them "hey - you have a problem - please fix it". For some reason these people cannot seem to work unless they have you on line and are wasting your time. See the need for "personal interaction"?
Ok.. so you undertake to not let them waste your time. If you don't pay the bill - you know they will eventually have to call you up. At least you avoid most of the robots. Again - you are unlikely to be able to get them to do anything to correct your account unless you are willing to let them put you on hold.
IMHO part of the rift between the sexes falls into this area. Women have always carried the lion's share of the responsibility of raising the next generation. Babies and children need constant attention and were it not for their mother's propensity to talk, babies would propbably never learn to speak. Given this, is it such a surprise that women tend to like careers that are "people" oriented? People like this tend to view solitude as punishment, certainly not an opportunity.
Back to cubicals. The rift is that the people who manage the company and who tend to bring in the revenues via sales and marketing all tend to be "people oriented" and see their strength in the group. When they go off on their own they tend to shut down. It is di
I would be one who would want to virtualize the home version. Anyone doing development may need to do this. There are many legitimate reason - ease of debugging is one. Ease of determining how someone 0wn3d a machine is another.
CO2 actually does leave the atmosphere easily. Plants literally grow out of the air. This is where their Carbon comes from. The expected life of CO2 in the atmosphre is anywhere from 15 to about 50 years and its probably closer to the 15 than the 50.
Furthermore plants grow faster with the increase of CO2. This is proven and clearly obvious... obvious to any layman who can think and totally obvious to any intelligent biologist since they have been doing greenhouse studies on this for decades.
Since plant life growth rates increase we end up with additional CO2 stimulating plant growth and a new steady state is achieved within a couple decades. This is clearly NOT something our global warming folks want to hear... because their theories end up in the trash can unless they can constantly increase CO2 for ever and ever.
Note: Mankind's activities have clearly increased the amount of H2O in the atmosphere since we divert entire rivers via irrigation. For our climate modelers to claim that since H2O is short lived there is no net increase is the same as saying the humidifier in my house won't work since the water will be lost fairly soon after it is introduced. These ideas completely ignore the fact that H2O is being constantly pumped into the atmosphere via many mechanisms including burning fuel... irrigating lawns, running humidifiers in dry areas, and of course - wide spread irrigation.
The thing is we havn't been able to measure the H2O levels accurately. Thus people choose to wave their arms and say this effect is a "constant". To do so is to set change in the most significant variable to zero. One cannot have much faith in models which ignore the most significant variables.
Mod parent up.
Shitty moderation is not going to shut anyone up. This is NOTM/b> subject to political correctness any more than it is subject to a vote.
For a moderator to mod the parent "FlameBait" illustrates just how awful the moderation can be. Arrggghhhh.
CO2 is blamed for global warming yet the paleoclimate records show there is no correlation.
Please check the wikipedia artical on the integral fast reactor and check the talk pages. You will find I wrote part of that artical.
I am fully aware of what reactor designs such as the IFR can do. It is about 2 orders of magnitude better than your esitimate and indeed, the spent fuel (which is usuable in an IFR and other advanced designs) will remain dangerous for 1000's of years, just as you said... unless it is burned and thus turned into electricity.
The public has been lied to by the pollies - again. I am trying to help spread the truth.
I live in a city that is the headquarters of most of the Canadian Oil patch. Much of what we do is funded by oil money.
Dispite this fact, there are many very impartial people who live here and I happen to be one of them.
The oil industry is very unlikely to be able to supply the oil the population would like to consume. Thus, we will be doing our part to reduce at least North American comsumption of this fossil fuel. Like it or not. The general population is not going to like the idea that within 5 years we are most likely clearly going to be past the peak of world oil production as as such - CO2 emissions from oil (and gas) consumption are going to start to fall.
So like it or not - in the very near future we likely will meet our Kyoto targets.
There may be a lot of people freezing in the dark by then.
I have posted this before. Anyone who is conserned about CO2 emissions can buy a more fuel efficient vehical, take public transportation, and insulate their house. Putting R50 in the walls can virtually eliminate the consumption of winter heating oil and natural gas. During the construction phase, beefing up the walls to R50 adds as little as $1 buk per square foot of building envelope area. It can be cheaper than installing space heating and one wins both summer and winter... with a far more comfortable home.
What would be really nice is if people could forget the politics and focus on the problem. The problem is that like it or not - within a very few years the oil age will be over.
I for one will not worry very much about CO2 rising for the next 100 years driven by man's consumption of fossil fuels (at least oil and gas) because I know damn well oil and gas will not last that long. Most likely we will be seeing a world wide reduction in oil consumption of about 5% compounding per year by 2015. North American natural gas is already past peak. Most of the North American nitrogen fertilizer industry is presently shut down as a result. I suspect the plastics feedstocks industry will be next.
What does this have to do with global warnming. You sight political agendas rather than read the paper and check the data presented.
Stop trying to kill the messenger.
You are worng.
We have enough uranium mined to fuel a fleet of 100 reactors for close to 60,000 years.
The fuel efficiency is not an order of magnitude better - its is about 0.2/99.8 = 500x
Stop being so pessimistic.
News Release:
6 billion people are expected to die over the next 100 years. This is an annual death rate of about 60 million which is equal to the number of people killed in WWII (roughly 62 million).
The death rate is correlated with the expected rise in temperature attributed to Global Warming.
Dr. Tim Patterson - and he is only one of many - IS ON THE OTHER SIDE and he IS A CLIMATE SCIENTIST.
He is also a very credible climate scientist.
Note: Gore is a lawyer.
Note: In many trials if not most trials... one side is presenting fiction.
I for one believe OJ is innocent. But then maybe I believe his lawyers?
On this basis one can discount at least 1/2 of what lawyers say as being pure fiction whether it sounds believable or not. I tend to think the smell factor with polies is higher than 1/2 but then I'm an optimist.
Question: In a trial, how often do we find the lawyers agreeing?
Why should we expect a concensus in the debate on global warming? The sides will simply forget all about it and find something else to bicker about. Eventually a concensus will form in the scientific community. As this happens the media will ignore it because their purpose is not to convey information - it's to sell papers and advertizing.
I am reminded of a comment by one of my physics profs: Sometimes one generation has to die off. He was refering to the time it took for the physics community to accept Einstein's relativity theory.
Well written. Too bad you are A. Coward.
Now that you have pointed out that only about 1% of the fuel gets burned (figure is a little low) - please calculate what fraction of the mined uranium makes it through the enrichment process?
I think you will find the overall discard rate of mined uranium is something like 99.8% But I will let you do you own numbers.
Check the demographics in the Middle East, SE Asia, the "stans, India and Africa.
I'll not do the chemistry. Its not hard. Plant biomass is a sugar polymer: (CH2O)n. When you convert it to ethanol (C2H5OH) you get an energy equivalent of about 2 barrels of oil from a tonne of dry biomass.
(I"m not talking about oils).
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day and about 2/3 is imported.
Since we really don't have cellulose -> ethanol conversion down pat (and we also need to work on pentosan's and lignans) we are going to need one hell of a lot of sugar to fill the gas tanks of North America.
I question if North America can grow enough to both feed itself and provide energy... but some are optimistic and perhaps an all out Hemp program should be undertaken. Productivity of Hemp is quite a lot higher than corn for instance.
Is Gore a climate scientist? ...or any other kind of scientist?
Eh?
The reason you should "waste" some times is that we can't vote on climate change. It is not political. Regardless who brings the message, if the message is correct then it behoves us to pay attention to what the messenger is saying.
This "association" claimed between the "left" and the "right" reminds me of my high school math teacher's inclination to have the class "vote" on the correct answer. Math is also not subject to a "vote".
We may have climate change. But if we do it is not caused by CO2. Comparatively speaking: CO2 concentrations compared to the major green house gas is like comparing a sheet of toilet paper to a tree stump. Presence or lack of mountains is far more important for instance. There are a lot of factors. CO2 is very minor.
Have a read here: http://www.friendsofscience.org/
Dr. Tim Patterson for instance states that global temperatures and CO2 are not coupled. Patterson is paid by Carleton University which is turn is supported by two (2) governments both of whom are trying to sell Kyoto to the Canadian public. I would suggest you take his course on Paleoclimatology.
So in this case, those who are paying the salaries are not getting Patterson's support.
I am reminded of the press yapping about "Limits to Growth" in the 70's. A couple years after I graduated I happened to be wandering through the Geology Library at the UofC and found a thesis written by a grad student at the Colorado School of Mines. He discovered the Runge Kutta numerical integrations of the model used in "Limits to Growth" were often not converging. He discoved many other outright mathematical and other errors.... and published them.
Clearly the press is not all that interested in publishing facts. I've never seen a comment or retraction of the speculation surrounding "Limits to Growth" despite the fact that it has been discredited for over 30 years.
Why is this posted in /. ?
Its not news. Its a toy. It generates a few neutrons. Big deal. It's not going to become a power source. So what is this "hopefully"? Hopefully I will live forever. I would love to believe in fantacy. Alas I have to slog it out in reality.
Read this: http://www.cei.org/pdf/5478.pdf
This is a 120 page criticizm of "An Inconvienant Truth". I didn't write it do if you guys have issues then please take it up with Marlo Lewis.
M. Lewis is a Senior Fellow in Envirnomental Policy ast the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
http://www.cei.org/
You can contact CWI through their website. Lewis's research is pretty through and I'll advise anyone who really wants to know the truth to actually read what he has to say and think about it rather than just posting a knee jerk reaction. Lewis makes some pretty good points.
If course I expect my post will get modded down. If so - its just another knee jerk reaction by those who wish to suppress the truth rather than actually look at the data.
Check out which side of the road Sweden drives on. Perhaps the average Swede is a little smarter than the average Brit?
It is truely amasing how technically incompetant some people are. That they can walk and talk is sometimes a surprise. I sometimes think the human race has already split into two streams. If so the problem is we have the worng people running the show and there is little accountability.
If they spent $2500 pounds on average on 200 machines then imagine if only 10% of that money had been made available to technically competant people! The rest of the money could have been donated to the welfare budget.
Dilogic has had sychronous cards out since at least 1995. I'll bet that Asterix will support sychronous.
This illustrates again what is wrong with the USPTO and software patents in general.
Why can't we organise a class action against Microsoft? It is their shitty code that is responsible for most of this... their shitty code and really poorly thought out security measures.
Then we should go after some of the large ISP who hide their brains in the sand (shit anyone) and pretend they do not know certain customer's machines are spewing night and day.
Simple. Many ISPs' don't pull the plug.