That sounds eerily familiar. I heard troublesome younger siblings complain that they had been living all their lives in the shadow of the first-born, so there might be something to it.
There might also be another explanation for the "crazy guy" phenomenon. According to manyarticles, half of mankind is infected by a parasite, Toxoplasma, that is known to radically alter the behavior of rats. It's also suspected of creating schizophrenia-like symptoms in some human subjects who are either more sensitive or highly infected.
So it's entirely possible that some cases of "unruly teen" behavior might be linked to a parasitic infection. A blood test is $30 and the cure is a couple of cheap pills. Next time I have an episode of road rage, I'm getting tested.
Read up about it. It is both fascinating and disturbing. And it could save someone you know.
They are the youngest sibling in both cases, but since my sample size is limited, I don't think it's statistically significant. Now, if you happen to hava a larger data set, I'm all ears.
I know of at least two families of decent, considerate people who raised their kids normally. In both these families, the kids are bright, honest people, except for one sibling (in both cases) who stands out like a sore thumb for his antisocial attitude. Both did time in youth correction then in jail, repeatedly. The parents can hardly be blamed, they tried everything. I think that at least one of the kids has the same psychopathic attitude as the murderer mentioned in TFA.
I really suspect a genetic disorder in these cases. I don't know which one, but I fail to see how the same household could produce such wildly dissimilar siblings. Same parents, same environment, same education... It's got to be genomes.
This is not to absolve the little perps. Except in the most extreme cases, most people with psychopathic tendencies can exercise will power to keep themselves out of trouble. That's why I didn't take a gun in my car, for example. Yet, most of these bastards hogging the freeway during my commute would amply deserve a few high-caliber bursts, let me tell ya. But did I do it? Nope. Sheer will power at work. So I *know* it can be done. You always have a choice unless you are desperately screwed up.
Well, the article's conclusion looks pretty clear to me. Watch for scan errors in smartd reports. When they start happening, migrate your data off that disk and replace it.
It's perhaps ironic that I run my own online game publishing company now and have become a dependent customer of the platform and technologies I once worked to create. Some of you might call it "justice" -- if it is, I wish it for my successors working on Vista.
All together now: Karma is a bitch!
Now I just want to see the guys who created Word waste as much time and lose as many data as your average desktop user thanks to pointless "improvements" of this mediocre piece of code.
The interesting thing with radio transmissions is that the spectrum gets increasingly crowded. To compensate for this, we are deploying technologies that compress signals and spread transmissions over multiple frequencies. Sometimes we add encryption too (think 802.11 or Sirius/XM radio). However, all of this makes signal increasingly hard to detect, and any degradation in S/N ratio makes these transmissions look essentially like noise.
Sure, today we have powerful AM and FM transmitters, but tomorrow, we might decide to replace them with other, more efficient technologies in order to reuse the freed frequencies for some other applications. Heck, with the cost of auctioned spectrum, you have powerful incentives to ditch inefficient transmissions if someone can make a better use of your frequencies.
So it's likely that uncompressed radio transmissions will be almost non existent in 20 years due to spectrum scarcity. Our civilization will therefore be almost impossible to detect using the technologies described in TFA.
It means that a civilization using radio transmissions can only be detected during a 100-year visibility window at most. Before that, they don't have powerful emitters. After that, they compress and spread everything.
It well might be the reason why the Seti program hasn't found anything yet. And if this is true, our chances of being in the right place at the right time with our Seti receivers are quite small: we might very well have let slipped the visibility window of the closest civilizations. Hey, the Tau Cetians might have come and gone through the early radio age during our Renaissance, for all we know. Now they are only broadcasting encrypted, compressed stuff that looks like noise.
So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.
I see that John Markoff is keeping with his habit of peppering his articles with unsustained, unproven assertions. I know that this is the NYT and not a real paper, but still, someone is bound to notice eventually.
To set things straight: Of course bots attack Linux servers. I am running a mail server that filters out millions of attacks a day and logs hundres of thousands of others. Every single one of these attacks comes from an 0wned Windows machine. Including some corporate servers.
But that doesn't mean that there are bot nets made out of non-Windows machines out there. It would be a huge news and would rattle the world of network security. So you'd have heard of it. We all would have.
It's rather sad to see that this uncoherent piece passes for "News for Nerds". News for technically illiterate, computerphobic bourgeois to read with they overpriced designer mocha, yes, but for the rest of us, that's a waste of bandwigth.
I'm all in favor of the OLPC project. It's a great project, but it shouldn't be seen as a world savior either. OLPC is a project that will make a few Westerners feel good and will help a few thousand (or tens of thousands) people acquire the basics of computing, provided that they are in the right conditions to start with.
But OLPC is not going to convince warring tribes that they should start loving their neighbors. It's not going to resolve hatreds and conflicts that have been raging for decades, if not longer in some cases.
Before a new technology has a chance to improve lives, the basic sociological problems have to be solved. In a place where slavery is OK (they still exist), where women and children are fair game, and where the winner takes all, law and stability extend only as far as the reach of the local warlord -- until the next one takes over. And having to fight bouts of malaria while trying to avoid being caught between warring factions doesn't help making time for learning to read, much less for learning computing.
So let's have reasonable expectation here. If the project is supposed to create world peace, then it will be doomed a failure regardless of its achievements.
It's an interesting idea, and of course, many writers anticipated that solar mirrors could be used in space or on the moon for smeltering ore and do high-temp chemistry in general. See the "High Justice" novel for example. I'm not sure about free-standing focus as a hot zone, though that's interesting. It's definitely something hairy enough to keep a bunch of enginners working overtime for a few years, for nothing is simple in space. But as long as it doesn't contradict physics and there is a need, there is a way!
Yup. Back when I was (briefly) working at a fab makind Motorola MC68000 processor under license, we got a visit from Apple buyers. The price they demanded was ridiculous, and was lower than the fab's break-even point. So the factory had to refuse to deal with Apple, and the sales people there were bitter about Apple's attitude.
So Apple was a bitchy customer back then, and source at IBM tell me they were very demanding with Big Blue, too.
The reason is that IBM was making most of its PowerPC business on either powerful, server-level processors or on low-power embedded cores (often with only a subset of the PowerPC functionalities). Apple wanted a fast laptop chipset, which meant adding complex laptop-style power management circuiterey to a server-style chip, with probably a different fabrication process to boot.
There was no way to justify that much engineering cost for the meager volume that Apple was going to buy. Yes, Apple ships a lot of laptops, but compared to other lines of business, it's still a small volume. IBM couldn't develop these chips without charging Apple much more per unit. So Apple went to Intel for their high-volume, low-cost laptop chipset, for which engineering cost is recouped on tens of millions of units.
Meanwhile, MS, Sony and Nintendo needed an embeddable core with a strong graphics and signal processing capability, and they found that IBM was able to customize a PowerPC chip to suit their needs (and note that battery life is not a factor here: a 100-watt chipset is OK for a console).
Why not a solar collecting mirror? Just eject the trash thru the focus at low velocity. A mirror could be just cheap foil and framework, too.
That would most certainly be a good source of heat. Using it would be more like burning one batch at a time rather than flying the trash through the focus, though.
Now, I don't think that full-size a solar oven was ever flown in a mission. Any high-temp source would need a lot of controls and safety measures. Physics says it can be done, but the engineering problems are yet to be solved. There are solar ovens on Earth, but they use materials and systems that are too heavy to be flown.
So if you want an engineering challenge to keep you busy, you got it: how to fly a ton of refractory bricks on a 100-kg payload budget.:-)
A rocket is not a closed combustion chamber. You are not trying to burn wet waste in an oven, you are generating hot gases -- by burning some hypergolic mix or some solid propellant. Different things.
A person could throw it with the hand towards the earth and have more than enough 'thrust' to 'deorbit' it. Orbit is a VERY precarious balancing act. Just a little higher or lower, faster or slower and you lose it.
Aladrin,
Deorbiting almost always means "leaving orbit and reaching the surface". That's not the same as "changing orbit". You are right when you say an orbit is precarious: by definition, a few more meters per second will give you a slighly different orbit, with differences accumulating quickly as time passes.
To leave the ISS orbit and return to Earth, you need a delta-V of several kilometer/second. In practice, once you reach a low enough orbit, atmo drag will quickly brake you, so you "only" need to produce a delta-V of a few hundreds to a few thousands meter/second to reach such a low altitude. That's what deorbiting means.
The ISS is in low Earth orbit and does experience atmospheric drag. There is no reason to think trash thrown out would not de orbit in time. How much time, I do not know.
We agree. The atmospheric drag is very perceptible at this LEO altitude. Hence, low density packages expelled from the ISS will eventually drop and burn. But it will take time: the delta-V is not THAT small.
They could pack their trash and, with minimal thrust, send it on a quick reentry path in which it will burn in higher atmosphere a few days or weeks later.
Yeah, because see, all these rocket scientists, they are well known for bein' stoopid. Ain't that a shame to pollute them purty stars.
SARCASM_MODE=OFF
If all you needed to deorbit something thrown from the ISS was a "small amount of thrust", don't you think that atmospheric drag would have already deorbitted the ISS itself?
In order to deorbit something, you need a very considerable amount of thrust, with an engine and propellant brought up from Earth at enormous cost. Left to its own device, a low-density object such as a bag of trash is going to slowly lose altitude due to atmospheric drag, then burn. No need for propellants. Good old air envelope does the trick.
As for reusing it, I'm afraid that a sizeable fraction of the trash is, er, astronaut dung. I doubt the reuse value of human waste is very high in space, until we have complete hydroponic gardens.
there is no reason not to incinerate their trash.
Incinerate? Whaaa?? Look, this is space, ok? Having a simple combustion chamber working in space would be a major, major physics achievement. There is no convection, so flames don't behave as expected. There are whole experiments studying a simple candle flame in space.
Never mind the fact that you'd need oxygen and fuel, brought from Earth at enormous cost, to burn wet waste.
The only way to incinerate things in space practically would be with a electric plasma arc, which in turn would requires a really large energy input. So until the ISS flies several isotope generators, there will be no such thing.
Remember, these decisions are made by people who actually know what's going on. The only problem is that they obviously don't communicate their reasons, since Slashdot readers -- Slashdot readers! -- feel compelled to call them stupid.
...For browsing the internet with IE. An IT department that lets employee do that is inviting trouble, period.
I used to be all compassionate and sympathetic with victims, but now I am just tired of the overall cluelessness, carelessness and inertia in 90% of IT departments out there.
If fishermen were behaving like an IT department, they'll slather themselves with fish offals, then jump in shark-infested water.
Electron volt is a ùass unit. An electric field is measured in volt/meter. That "electron" word has to be a typo from someone with a very limited understanding of physics.
french people are emigrating fast, at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 each year, and it has been going like this for years already (2+ million people left the country, compare this with Cuba). This is the most massive exodus this country has ever known since the French Revolution ! There are reasons behind this continuous stream of people, reasons for fleeing this country.
Parent is right, we are witnessing a mass exodus of Frenchmen with
marketable skills. To give you an idea, when the 18th century Kings of France offered 40 acres and a mule to French farmers accepting to go colonize the New World, less than 50,000 Frenchman ever accepted and left the country. We aren't talking Ireland here: The French historically never emigrated massively. If they are suddenly doing so, there must be a problem.
Indeed, engineers and scientists are fleeing to England and
the US, mostly. This is not good for a country that heavily spends on
public universities and has low tuition. It means that the French
taxpayers are subsidizing foreign countries to the detriment of their
own.
Also, there is a massive level of illegal immigration in France,
and the illegals are, in their majority, unable to occupy a high-tech
job for lack of qualification (by definition, immigrants with
marketable skills don't need to be illegal, they will easily go
through the work permit procedures). Most of the illegals end up in
either low-paid jobs or on the dole, thus requiring social services
paid by the taxpayer.
Conclusion: This means that France is effectively swapping
highly qualified workers for unskilled immigrants. French taxes are
quite high as a result, and more importantly, the country's future is
bleak: this continuous brain drain cannot improve an already bad
situation.
When President Chirac was challenged by journalists about this
problem, he said that skilled workers leaving the country are "making
room for unemployed people". This clearly shows the French elites are
clueless: high tech jobs are hard to fill, and retraining unemployed
people to take these jobs is rarely a solution. Especially when they
arrive from a poor country and lack even basic skills.
The OECD has
nice little graphs showing the level of general government spending in various countries, which is to say, how much of the country's production ends up in the government's pocket. Right now, France is at about 54% and still growing: Out of 8 hours, you work 4 hours and 20 minutes for the government in France. As a comparison, the US is at 26%, The UK at 34%.
I fail to see why a Slashdot reader would want to move to a country that will tax him/her so highly in order to support such a disastrous policy and such moronic, disconnected elites.
Smart what? Oh, you mean, like, this sarcasm thing I keep hearing about?
Look, I am an engineer, okay? I am the kind of show-off geeks who answers rhetorical questions. Are you trying to mess me up with your humor? Are you one of these hippies? Have mercy, man!
August 9, 2010: Microsoft announced today he first patch for their first microchip, the MSME VID2009 videogame engine core.
The VID2009 chip was recently taped out by the newly formed MS Micro-electronics division. It was widely acclaimed as a new era for MS, altohugh the two analysts still not paid by MS voiced concerns about how the usual Microsoft quality control would not fly with electronic microchips.
MS issued the patch in response to reports about VID2009-equipped videogame consoles spontaneously bursting into flames and cutting users' fingers by snapping the DVD reader door too quickly. The reports have been piling up since 2007. "Since MS bought every other game console maker, it's not like we consumers have a choice", says Gaban Tycho, a self-appointed gaming affair watchdog. "Face it, today's dedicated gamer has either burnt skin patches or missing fingers. Sometimes both. Hey, since you've got fingers, could you open that bottle of burn lotion for me?"
Today's patch is expected to solve these issues, although initial reports show it might introduce other problems: when the voice recognition headset is used and the user pronounces the word "Linux", the patched unit sends 110V AC through the headphones.
The patch is replacing 53 logic gates, changing two nano-instructions and rerouting 12 clock signals inside the VID2009 chip.
A small issue might delay the application of the patch, though: It requires replacing the chip itself. An MS spokeperson said that the replacement was covered by the standard MS two-week warranty, but that older units would have to be discarded.
As usual, the MS Patch Police, a team of electronics expert affectionately known as the Blue Squad of Death, will patrol neighborhoods and listen to howls of pain to determine where faulty consoles might be located. Unpatchable units will be shredded at customers' premices. "I hate those guys", Tycho said. "Last time, I stepped on my cat's tail and here came the Blue Squad, ramming through the door. They couldn't find the console so they destroyed the toaster instead."
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds eerily familiar. I heard troublesome younger siblings complain that they had been living all their lives in the shadow of the first-born, so there might be something to it.
There might also be another explanation for the "crazy guy" phenomenon. According to many articles, half of mankind is infected by a parasite, Toxoplasma, that is known to radically alter the behavior of rats. It's also suspected of creating schizophrenia-like symptoms in some human subjects who are either more sensitive or highly infected.
So it's entirely possible that some cases of "unruly teen" behavior might be linked to a parasitic infection. A blood test is $30 and the cure is a couple of cheap pills. Next time I have an episode of road rage, I'm getting tested.
Read up about it. It is both fascinating and disturbing. And it could save someone you know.
Porcupine8,
They are the youngest sibling in both cases, but since my sample size is limited, I don't think it's statistically significant. Now, if you happen to hava a larger data set, I'm all ears.
I know of at least two families of decent, considerate people who raised their kids normally. In both these families, the kids are bright, honest people, except for one sibling (in both cases) who stands out like a sore thumb for his antisocial attitude. Both did time in youth correction then in jail, repeatedly. The parents can hardly be blamed, they tried everything. I think that at least one of the kids has the same psychopathic attitude as the murderer mentioned in TFA.
I really suspect a genetic disorder in these cases. I don't know which one, but I fail to see how the same household could produce such wildly dissimilar siblings. Same parents, same environment, same education... It's got to be genomes.
This is not to absolve the little perps. Except in the most extreme cases, most people with psychopathic tendencies can exercise will power to keep themselves out of trouble. That's why I didn't take a gun in my car, for example. Yet, most of these bastards hogging the freeway during my commute would amply deserve a few high-caliber bursts, let me tell ya. But did I do it? Nope. Sheer will power at work. So I *know* it can be done. You always have a choice unless you are desperately screwed up.
Well, the article's conclusion looks pretty clear to me. Watch for scan errors in smartd reports. When they start happening, migrate your data off that disk and replace it.
It's perhaps ironic that I run my own online game publishing company now and have become a dependent customer of the platform and technologies I once worked to create. Some of you might call it "justice" -- if it is, I wish it for my successors working on Vista.
All together now: Karma is a bitch!
Now I just want to see the guys who created Word waste as much time and lose as many data as your average desktop user thanks to pointless "improvements" of this mediocre piece of code.
I like the way you stink, err, think. :-)
The interesting thing with radio transmissions is that the spectrum gets increasingly crowded. To compensate for this, we are deploying technologies that compress signals and spread transmissions over multiple frequencies. Sometimes we add encryption too (think 802.11 or Sirius/XM radio). However, all of this makes signal increasingly hard to detect, and any degradation in S/N ratio makes these transmissions look essentially like noise. Sure, today we have powerful AM and FM transmitters, but tomorrow, we might decide to replace them with other, more efficient technologies in order to reuse the freed frequencies for some other applications. Heck, with the cost of auctioned spectrum, you have powerful incentives to ditch inefficient transmissions if someone can make a better use of your frequencies. So it's likely that uncompressed radio transmissions will be almost non existent in 20 years due to spectrum scarcity. Our civilization will therefore be almost impossible to detect using the technologies described in TFA. It means that a civilization using radio transmissions can only be detected during a 100-year visibility window at most. Before that, they don't have powerful emitters. After that, they compress and spread everything. It well might be the reason why the Seti program hasn't found anything yet. And if this is true, our chances of being in the right place at the right time with our Seti receivers are quite small: we might very well have let slipped the visibility window of the closest civilizations. Hey, the Tau Cetians might have come and gone through the early radio age during our Renaissance, for all we know. Now they are only broadcasting encrypted, compressed stuff that looks like noise.
So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.
I see that John Markoff is keeping with his habit of peppering his articles with unsustained, unproven assertions. I know that this is the NYT and not a real paper, but still, someone is bound to notice eventually.
To set things straight: Of course bots attack Linux servers. I am running a mail server that filters out millions of attacks a day and logs hundres of thousands of others. Every single one of these attacks comes from an 0wned Windows machine. Including some corporate servers.
But that doesn't mean that there are bot nets made out of non-Windows machines out there. It would be a huge news and would rattle the world of network security. So you'd have heard of it. We all would have.
It's rather sad to see that this uncoherent piece passes for "News for Nerds". News for technically illiterate, computerphobic bourgeois to read with they overpriced designer mocha, yes, but for the rest of us, that's a waste of bandwigth.
I'm all in favor of the OLPC project. It's a great project, but it shouldn't be seen as a world savior either. OLPC is a project that will make a few Westerners feel good and will help a few thousand (or tens of thousands) people acquire the basics of computing, provided that they are in the right conditions to start with.
But OLPC is not going to convince warring tribes that they should start loving their neighbors. It's not going to resolve hatreds and conflicts that have been raging for decades, if not longer in some cases.
Before a new technology has a chance to improve lives, the basic sociological problems have to be solved. In a place where slavery is OK (they still exist), where women and children are fair game, and where the winner takes all, law and stability extend only as far as the reach of the local warlord -- until the next one takes over. And having to fight bouts of malaria while trying to avoid being caught between warring factions doesn't help making time for learning to read, much less for learning computing.
So let's have reasonable expectation here. If the project is supposed to create world peace, then it will be doomed a failure regardless of its achievements.
It's an interesting idea, and of course, many writers anticipated that solar mirrors could be used in space or on the moon for smeltering ore and do high-temp chemistry in general. See the "High Justice" novel for example. I'm not sure about free-standing focus as a hot zone, though that's interesting. It's definitely something hairy enough to keep a bunch of enginners working overtime for a few years, for nothing is simple in space. But as long as it doesn't contradict physics and there is a need, there is a way!
Yup. Back when I was (briefly) working at a fab makind Motorola MC68000 processor under license, we got a visit from Apple buyers. The price they demanded was ridiculous, and was lower than the fab's break-even point. So the factory had to refuse to deal with Apple, and the sales people there were bitter about Apple's attitude.
So Apple was a bitchy customer back then, and source at IBM tell me they were very demanding with Big Blue, too.
Pikul,
The reason is that IBM was making most of its PowerPC business on either powerful, server-level processors or on low-power embedded cores (often with only a subset of the PowerPC functionalities). Apple wanted a fast laptop chipset, which meant adding complex laptop-style power management circuiterey to a server-style chip, with probably a different fabrication process to boot.
There was no way to justify that much engineering cost for the meager volume that Apple was going to buy. Yes, Apple ships a lot of laptops, but compared to other lines of business, it's still a small volume. IBM couldn't develop these chips without charging Apple much more per unit. So Apple went to Intel for their high-volume, low-cost laptop chipset, for which engineering cost is recouped on tens of millions of units.
Meanwhile, MS, Sony and Nintendo needed an embeddable core with a strong graphics and signal processing capability, and they found that IBM was able to customize a PowerPC chip to suit their needs (and note that battery life is not a factor here: a 100-watt chipset is OK for a console).
That's all there is to it.
Why not a solar collecting mirror? Just eject the trash thru the focus at low velocity. A mirror could be just cheap foil and framework, too.
That would most certainly be a good source of heat. Using it would be more like burning one batch at a time rather than flying the trash through the focus, though.
Now, I don't think that full-size a solar oven was ever flown in a mission. Any high-temp source would need a lot of controls and safety measures. Physics says it can be done, but the engineering problems are yet to be solved. There are solar ovens on Earth, but they use materials and systems that are too heavy to be flown.
So if you want an engineering challenge to keep you busy, you got it: how to fly a ton of refractory bricks on a 100-kg payload budget. :-)
A rocket is not a closed combustion chamber. You are not trying to burn wet waste in an oven, you are generating hot gases -- by burning some hypergolic mix or some solid propellant. Different things.
Amazingly little is known about how a standing fire (as opposed to a burning jet of gases) behaves in low gravity. See for example http://microgravity.grc.nasa.gov/fcarchive/combust ion/papers/Sacksteder/Solid_Surface_Combustion.htm . Thus, any process requiring a standing fire in low grav is not a practical method (yet). And of course, you don't want to waste fuel on burning waste.
A solar sail could safely deorbit junk at minimal cost.
Or you could just leave it float around until it drags down to a low orbit... Not sure about the low cost. Solar sails are still highly experimental.
A person could throw it with the hand towards the earth and have more than enough 'thrust' to 'deorbit' it. Orbit is a VERY precarious balancing act. Just a little higher or lower, faster or slower and you lose it.
Aladrin,
Deorbiting almost always means "leaving orbit and reaching the surface". That's not the same as "changing orbit". You are right when you say an orbit is precarious: by definition, a few more meters per second will give you a slighly different orbit, with differences accumulating quickly as time passes.
To leave the ISS orbit and return to Earth, you need a delta-V of several kilometer/second. In practice, once you reach a low enough orbit, atmo drag will quickly brake you, so you "only" need to produce a delta-V of a few hundreds to a few thousands meter/second to reach such a low altitude. That's what deorbiting means.
The ISS is in low Earth orbit and does experience atmospheric drag. There is no reason to think trash thrown out would not de orbit in time. How much time, I do not know.
We agree. The atmospheric drag is very perceptible at this LEO altitude. Hence, low density packages expelled from the ISS will eventually drop and burn. But it will take time: the delta-V is not THAT small.
They could pack their trash and, with minimal thrust, send it on a quick reentry path in which it will burn in higher atmosphere a few days or weeks later.
Yeah, because see, all these rocket scientists, they are well known for bein' stoopid. Ain't that a shame to pollute them purty stars.
SARCASM_MODE=OFF
If all you needed to deorbit something thrown from the ISS was a "small amount of thrust", don't you think that atmospheric drag would have already deorbitted the ISS itself?
In order to deorbit something, you need a very considerable amount of thrust, with an engine and propellant brought up from Earth at enormous cost. Left to its own device, a low-density object such as a bag of trash is going to slowly lose altitude due to atmospheric drag, then burn. No need for propellants. Good old air envelope does the trick.
As for reusing it, I'm afraid that a sizeable fraction of the trash is, er, astronaut dung. I doubt the reuse value of human waste is very high in space, until we have complete hydroponic gardens.
there is no reason not to incinerate their trash.
Incinerate? Whaaa?? Look, this is space, ok? Having a simple combustion chamber working in space would be a major, major physics achievement. There is no convection, so flames don't behave as expected. There are whole experiments studying a simple candle flame in space.
Never mind the fact that you'd need oxygen and fuel, brought from Earth at enormous cost, to burn wet waste.
The only way to incinerate things in space practically would be with a electric plasma arc, which in turn would requires a really large energy input. So until the ISS flies several isotope generators, there will be no such thing.
Remember, these decisions are made by people who actually know what's going on. The only problem is that they obviously don't communicate their reasons, since Slashdot readers -- Slashdot readers! -- feel compelled to call them stupid.
...For browsing the internet with IE. An IT department that lets employee do that is inviting trouble, period.
I used to be all compassionate and sympathetic with victims, but now I am just tired of the overall cluelessness, carelessness and inertia in 90% of IT departments out there.
If fishermen were behaving like an IT department, they'll slather themselves with fish offals, then jump in shark-infested water.
Weird typo. I guess it is a fitting punishment to let a typo go through in a post complaining about a typo...
Electron volt is a ùass unit. An electric field is measured in volt/meter. That "electron" word has to be a typo from someone with a very limited understanding of physics.
french people are emigrating fast, at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 each year, and it has been going like this for years already (2+ million people left the country, compare this with Cuba). This is the most massive exodus this country has ever known since the French Revolution ! There are reasons behind this continuous stream of people, reasons for fleeing this country.
Parent is right, we are witnessing a mass exodus of Frenchmen with marketable skills. To give you an idea, when the 18th century Kings of France offered 40 acres and a mule to French farmers accepting to go colonize the New World, less than 50,000 Frenchman ever accepted and left the country. We aren't talking Ireland here: The French historically never emigrated massively. If they are suddenly doing so, there must be a problem.
Indeed, engineers and scientists are fleeing to England and the US, mostly. This is not good for a country that heavily spends on public universities and has low tuition. It means that the French taxpayers are subsidizing foreign countries to the detriment of their own.
Also, there is a massive level of illegal immigration in France, and the illegals are, in their majority, unable to occupy a high-tech job for lack of qualification (by definition, immigrants with marketable skills don't need to be illegal, they will easily go through the work permit procedures). Most of the illegals end up in either low-paid jobs or on the dole, thus requiring social services paid by the taxpayer.
Conclusion: This means that France is effectively swapping highly qualified workers for unskilled immigrants. French taxes are quite high as a result, and more importantly, the country's future is bleak: this continuous brain drain cannot improve an already bad situation.
When President Chirac was challenged by journalists about this problem, he said that skilled workers leaving the country are "making room for unemployed people". This clearly shows the French elites are clueless: high tech jobs are hard to fill, and retraining unemployed people to take these jobs is rarely a solution. Especially when they arrive from a poor country and lack even basic skills.
The OECD has nice little graphs showing the level of general government spending in various countries, which is to say, how much of the country's production ends up in the government's pocket. Right now, France is at about 54% and still growing: Out of 8 hours, you work 4 hours and 20 minutes for the government in France. As a comparison, the US is at 26%, The UK at 34%.
I fail to see why a Slashdot reader would want to move to a country that will tax him/her so highly in order to support such a disastrous policy and such moronic, disconnected elites.
Smart what? Oh, you mean, like, this sarcasm thing I keep hearing about?
Look, I am an engineer, okay? I am the kind of show-off geeks who answers rhetorical questions. Are you trying to mess me up with your humor? Are you one of these hippies? Have mercy, man!
Fortunately, nobody knows how to pronounce "Linux".
Well, Linus does...
But yeah, I guess the VID2009 won't kill you when it hears Lie-noox.
August 9, 2010: Microsoft announced today he first patch for their first microchip, the MSME VID2009 videogame engine core.
The VID2009 chip was recently taped out by the newly formed MS Micro-electronics division. It was widely acclaimed as a new era for MS, altohugh the two analysts still not paid by MS voiced concerns about how the usual Microsoft quality control would not fly with electronic microchips.
MS issued the patch in response to reports about VID2009-equipped videogame consoles spontaneously bursting into flames and cutting users' fingers by snapping the DVD reader door too quickly. The reports have been piling up since 2007. "Since MS bought every other game console maker, it's not like we consumers have a choice", says Gaban Tycho, a self-appointed gaming affair watchdog. "Face it, today's dedicated gamer has either burnt skin patches or missing fingers. Sometimes both. Hey, since you've got fingers, could you open that bottle of burn lotion for me?"
Today's patch is expected to solve these issues, although initial reports show it might introduce other problems: when the voice recognition headset is used and the user pronounces the word "Linux", the patched unit sends 110V AC through the headphones.
The patch is replacing 53 logic gates, changing two nano-instructions and rerouting 12 clock signals inside the VID2009 chip. A small issue might delay the application of the patch, though: It requires replacing the chip itself. An MS spokeperson said that the replacement was covered by the standard MS two-week warranty, but that older units would have to be discarded.
As usual, the MS Patch Police, a team of electronics expert affectionately known as the Blue Squad of Death, will patrol neighborhoods and listen to howls of pain to determine where faulty consoles might be located. Unpatchable units will be shredded at customers' premices. "I hate those guys", Tycho said. "Last time, I stepped on my cat's tail and here came the Blue Squad, ramming through the door. They couldn't find the console so they destroyed the toaster instead."