I think the calculation behind that is simple: Will the public (well informed or not) be able to make sense of the footage? I say: i would not, and i probably belong already to the top 5% (or less) of the general population in term of how much sense i could make of it. The number of people qualified to assess these pictures worldwide and having had enough contact to the plans of the specific type of power plant to assess anything beyond "o my god, a lot of broken pipes" and recognize structures below the pile of rubble *and* draw correct and helpful conclusions is probably less than 10000. But the number "expert" commented versions of such a video on youtube would skyrocket......
Moreover its possible that such a video actually shows technology which has export restrictions, or gives hints on ho to attack nuclear power plants.
A router is a computer and it stores information. Many routers have access logs. For me breaking into an encrypted WLAN is like mechanically removing the lock from an ethernet port on private property and plugging youerself in. In the normal case you still can log what is currently going on (Wireless can not be switched, so you see all packets), and in the worst case see logs or manipulate the router without any trace.
Should i move to the netherlands, i will use a VPN service to access the internet and a cabled lan to access my NAS (thats anyway my current config).
I am sure, they keep it as a redirect. for sure in-links are mentioned in old documentation, for which customers may hold the new owner responsible (in the sense of the next buying decision). It makes a very bad impression if you follow a support instruction and end up on a webpage which does not exist (or worse: was sold and re-sold to a porn company).
Ok, i am a geek. I understand you want to be fancy. But counting 500 votes manually takes 250 seconds if one person does it, and less if several persons do it. So unless you want a "real-time" result, i would think its ok to take paper ballots. Moreover it will be a record of the voting.
On the other hand, i dont see why "the bandwidth is not enough" if you dont allow them surfing (or throttle it), then the BW should be fine, however consumer APs may have problems handling 500laptops. The problem is not to count people who cant connect as absent.
You can also have a mixed solution: Give out a sheet of paper to everybody which contains yes/no QR codes with url for the corresponding vote (make sure to secure it with a cryptographic signature), and tell the one who cant connect to give their paper manually, so you can quickly scan it.
Well. I wonder. If the levels are that low as the guy thinks, why did the jp gov have to raise the allowed limit to 250mSv. I am sure the workers wear individual Dosimeters.
Disclaimer for below: I am a physicist, but did not think about nuclear reaction for a long time and am no expert on them; If somebody could do the caclulations properly, and dismiss the below as completly improper, i am glad to hear:
The cool down pond contains a MMol of radioactive substance, which should, depending on the composition (time of use) between 10^17 and 10^20 decays per second (i am no expert on this, therefore the large interval), which corresponds to kW to MW of emitted radiation (if the fuel pool evaporated 2000m^3 water in 1 week, the lower end may the right order of magnitude, corresponding to no active reaction going on), corresponding to emitted radiation in the oder of kW to 10s of kW. if we assume that.1% of this fuel is distributed in a 1000m^3 (e.g. the building), you have watts per second, and milliwatts and m^3. Assuming the worst part may be the inhaled alpha and beta radiators, and that you lung keeps 5liter, you end up with 5muW, corresponding roughly to 10mGray, or hundred mSv per hour (alpha and beta radiators), and you may want to add something for the gamma rays. If this would be thinned by a factor of 10, then you end up with the values reported close to the plants. So the problem would arise iff the fuel ponds catch fire and a significant amount if released into the atmosphere, you could end up with polluting 10^7-10^8m^3 into an unhealthy radiation level. That is.1(km)^3. So if the fuel storage evaporates over a week and the airflow is 1m/second you may emit a quite unhealthy smoke (that would be Tchernobyl). Lets hopefully assume that the burning would be slower and that the air stream would be thinned in a way that corresponds to size of the last plume when it arrived over tokyo, (100km^3 = 10^11m^3?), yielding 10^4W/10^11m^2, which is.1muW/second and m^3, corresonding to.3mW/m^3 and hour, so the order of magnitude will be.1-10mSv/Day if the fuel pool goes into fire. So the dosage over a week could definitely get into the harmful range, even at 300km away (you can check that estimation also vs. the measured radiation data at the reactor and lets say yokohama, which is roughly a ratio of 1/10000, meaning that if it would be 1Sv at the reactor we would reach the level calculated) if the wind conditions are awful and a lot of fuel burns/evaporates.
When i heard the amount of fuel stored in their plant under the open air, and that the radiation prevented them from working, i decided to take the plane to okinawa from tokyo. If they manage to cool the fuel pool in reactor 4 reliably (which contains the more active rods), then i will fly back (about the rest, even about a meltdown in the containment i am less worried), but i am definitely not a fan of getting the yearly radiation dose for a nuclear plant worker within a week.
So, no, no need to panic, but on the other hand if this would be too long over Tokyo, we can get new reliable Data on cancer caused byt radiation (in a 35Mio population, you can pick up change in rates on the order of a percent easily).
As i said: i am no expert on this, and i lack the most important information (specific composition of the fuel rods). But since i lack it, i may be pessimistic.
Concerning standards: Well vcards work well (even on old smartphones), but the apple seems to have intentionally skipped this function. And when it still was done via IRDA it also took little connection time, bluetooth can be slow. Two Palms (or palms plus e.g. nokia 6310) were quite quick at exchanging vcards via infrared.
(Actually from the PIM viewpoint i loved the palm m105 more than most of the devices i have tested up to now: well readable in sunlight, ran of standard batteries/rechargables, long battery life)
If i dont want to be tracked, u turn it off. Easy enough.
If i turn it on, the next cell station knows where i am regardless if the phone is open source or not.
If i really need it and dont want to be tracked, then i use a sim card which does not require my name and a cheap used handset, bought with cash.
If i am really paranoid, i get the phone from a shop somewhere outside the country of use and only use data transfers with vpns.
So nothing of this has to do much with open source or not, even if i appreciate it. Even if i have an open source phone, if the manufacturer is evil, then he puts the tracker in the firmware.
So i prefer the off/unidentified mobile solution over any "open source snakeoil"
Did you actually read my comment? I will summarize it for you:
a) often you may need more math that you imaging, and sometime you *can* use math to solve a problem more efficient.
b) Understanding math well broadens the range of jobs you can take.
c) Some thing are just imposed by your university to test you.
And just tell to my CS friends who do work on image processing (pattern recognition), signal processing (e.g. channel separation), quantum computer architectures and memory hierarchies that they don't need math. They will be surprised.
But if you want to say that CS should be split into "applied CS" and "general CS", i agree.
The style. He essentially does not ask: "What is wrong with gnome?" But he asks: "The world seems not like gnome, so what is wrong with the world?"
IMHO these are not good starting points. I don't say he is wrong, but lets say i think his ways of dealing tith the situation dont help to spread the gnome desktop.
To those who find math in their studies unnecessary:
During my studies i always thought: I am never going to use this, this is way too theoretical. And i thought that for theoretical physics as well as for mathematics. The came the master thesis in experimental physics and i needed the biggest part of what i learned and more.
I cant promise this happens to you in the same way, but i can state the following: If you want to be a programmer then don't study CS, but program. The difference between computer science and programming is that i don't expect (he/she may very well be able to) a programmer to be able to design a protocol to handle sporadic loss of data, because, well for this you need math (stochastic/linear algebra). Calculus can be used at many places. One which comes to my mind is "find the minimum" in resource usage which may have a known scaling on a variable which (e.g. number of subdivisions you use in divide and conquer) you set different parts of you program. Yes, sure you can experimentally figure that out. But every programmer can do that, you don't need CS for it. But he may not be able to make a function which automatically determines some parameter according to an available resource.
The other question is: do you want to restrict yourself to programming only things which don't require calculus? So this mean you don't consider the many "embedded control loop" or "embedded signal processing" jobs worthy of being cherry-picked by you? You don't believe that e.g. integrating or transforming a sensor input and being able to talk to your customer (which may be a physicist working for a company to make a product ready) about it will affect your professional career? Processing numerical data is still quite some field which may enter you path in one way or the other.
Ultimately, and this may now be a little harsh: Some of the tests in the first semesters are cases of "real artists ship". Its irrelevant if you like it. Its irrelevant if you understood it by intelligence. Its irrelevant how much you to work for it. Just get it done. Unless you have an explicit legasteny for math, passing a test of the very elementary math you usually learn is not a matter of talent alone, but mainly a matter of preparation. Preparation includes the parts: learning (and a little understanding), training and being ready to take the test (which is many times the biggest problem). If you have problems with the latter, go to a counselor. In my experience students mainly fail in math because there is some kind of unrealistic expectation leading to a mental block (along the lines of "math just requires intelligence, so if i am bad at math then i am stupid and will never understand it and nothing i do will change it"). My experience show that people who address these blocks early and openly have a much easier time to study and succeed, even if they are not in top percentiles of intelligence or talent.
But I think "Firewall" was in the uncanny valley just before "ok lets forget the facts and get this part done quickly so we arrive st the explosions". I forgive a movie which displays a bad hackings scene as a plot element for 30 seconds. But holy crap, torturing my brain for minutes and minutes how to read information with scanner build from a fax modem from a monitor by scrolling trough a database?????
I personally felt (400km away) the shock, two or three aftershocks and the nakano quake in the morning. Over this distance i would only feel a quake > 4 at the center (japanese scale).
at this place the primary shock was categorized to be 4 at my workplace which does not even make me get up from the chair (happens every few month), but i knew immediately that its big; the time between "the monitor shakes" and "the building shakes" gives you a rough estimation of the distance... and with that strength i knew it was > 6-7 (it felt more far away than the 7 nakano shock some time ago, and stronger).
No, i am safe (400km away) from all direct effects, but if the plant blows and the wind turns the story might be different. But ill now go and try to buy iodine tablets. I do not plan to move.
Your comment is not even worth negative mod points.
a) define broken. Especially define then "not broken" and tell me about which review system you would not say that it is broken.
b) The "powerful cliques" are quite large for the more important Journals. PRL has 1000s of possible referees. I dont think they are good buddies with each other and converse about each paper.
c) As a scientist is don't know what consensus is. I just know how knowledge make the path from a freshly published article to small reviews to reviews of modern physics and then sometimes it was important enough and still not falsified after 50 years enters the textbooks. It would be very interesting to hear from you where a peer-reviewed topic "was wrong" on a significant scale.
I guess it would be quite cheap that the US navy upgrades some ship to be in front of the coast with strongly directed Antennas to pick up/transmit Wireless (WiMAX, if you like to have an polular standard) signals or provides a directed radio links which can provide infrastructure for mobile cell towers. Probably something like strongly directed GSM network cell would also be possible.
Electronic Warefare Troops can probably do similar things with analog radio since a long time.
However that wold make the participating as much as if they would drop weapons.
the music industry stops whining. Since a DRM-Free Music store (Ubuntu One) which is convenient to use exists well integrated on my favourite OS, i already buy songs for rougly $10 per month, that is, from the musicians i want to hear. From the unresanble labels i will still buy a CD. Why should I pay for the 10+ collections of some people who just download for downloadings sake.
Its like with the movies: please focus on your customers (like me, who spends easily $300 per year in the cinema and $200 per year for renting DVDs). Please continue to use that revenue to make more good movies.
We don't need a fee for a new type of public brodcasts.
In Germany its a standard recommendation that if if the police catches you when speeding to ask for the calibration protocol of the device. There is a good chance you never will hear again from them.
And as a physicist: i agree. A meter which you have not calibrated and tested as prescribed in the instructions is worth nothing - there is no evidence that anybody was speeding; i would agree that he was speeding if the difference of measured vs allowed exceed the calibration range.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the calculation behind that is simple: Will the public (well informed or not) be able to make sense of the footage? I say: i would not, and i probably belong already to the top 5% (or less) of the general population in term of how much sense i could make of it. The number of people qualified to assess these pictures worldwide and having had enough contact to the plans of the specific type of power plant to assess anything beyond "o my god, a lot of broken pipes" and recognize structures below the pile of rubble *and* draw correct and helpful conclusions is probably less than 10000. But the number "expert" commented versions of such a video on youtube would skyrocket......
Moreover its possible that such a video actually shows technology which has export restrictions, or gives hints on ho to attack nuclear power plants.
I would have hoped that also dutch courts call experts.
A router is a computer and it stores information. Many routers have access logs. For me breaking into an encrypted WLAN is like mechanically removing the lock from an ethernet port on private property and plugging youerself in. In the normal case you still can log what is currently going on (Wireless can not be switched, so you see all packets), and in the worst case see logs or manipulate the router without any trace.
Should i move to the netherlands, i will use a VPN service to access the internet and a cabled lan to access my NAS (thats anyway my current config).
I am sure, they keep it as a redirect. for sure in-links are mentioned in old documentation, for which customers may hold the new owner responsible (in the sense of the next buying decision). It makes a very bad impression if you follow a support instruction and end up on a webpage which does not exist (or worse: was sold and re-sold to a porn company).
Ok, i am a geek. I understand you want to be fancy. But counting 500 votes manually takes 250 seconds if one person does it, and less if several persons do it. So unless you want a "real-time" result, i would think its ok to take paper ballots. Moreover it will be a record of the voting.
On the other hand, i dont see why "the bandwidth is not enough" if you dont allow them surfing (or throttle it), then the BW should be fine, however consumer APs may have problems handling 500laptops. The problem is not to count people who cant connect as absent.
You can also have a mixed solution:
Give out a sheet of paper to everybody which contains yes/no QR codes with url for the corresponding vote (make sure to secure it with a cryptographic signature), and tell the one who cant connect to give their paper manually, so you can quickly scan it.
Well. I wonder. If the levels are that low as the guy thinks, why did the jp gov have to raise the allowed limit to 250mSv. I am sure the workers wear individual Dosimeters.
Disclaimer for below: I am a physicist, but did not think about nuclear reaction for a long time and am no expert on them; If somebody could do the caclulations properly, and dismiss the below as completly improper, i am glad to hear:
The cool down pond contains a MMol of radioactive substance, which should, depending on the composition (time of use) between 10^17 and 10^20 decays per second (i am no expert on this, therefore the large interval), which corresponds to kW to MW of emitted radiation (if the fuel pool evaporated 2000m^3 water in 1 week, the lower end may the right order of magnitude, corresponding to no active reaction going on), corresponding to emitted radiation in the oder of kW to 10s of kW. if we assume that .1% of this fuel is distributed in a 1000m^3 (e.g. the building), you have watts per second, and milliwatts and m^3. Assuming the worst part may be the inhaled alpha and beta radiators, and that you lung keeps 5liter, you end up with 5muW, corresponding roughly to 10mGray, or hundred mSv per hour (alpha and beta radiators), and you may want to add something for the gamma rays. If this would be thinned by a factor of 10, then you end up with the values reported close to the plants. So the problem would arise iff the fuel ponds catch fire and a significant amount if released into the atmosphere, you could end up with polluting 10^7-10^8m^3 into an unhealthy radiation level. That is .1(km)^3. So if the fuel storage evaporates over a week and the airflow is 1m/second you may emit a quite unhealthy smoke (that would be Tchernobyl). Lets hopefully assume that the burning would be slower and that the air stream would be thinned in a way that corresponds to size of the last plume when it arrived over tokyo, (100km^3 = 10^11m^3?), yielding 10^4W/10^11m^2, which is .1muW/second and m^3, corresonding to .3mW/m^3 and hour, so the order of magnitude will be .1-10mSv/Day if the fuel pool goes into fire. So the dosage over a week could definitely get into the harmful range, even at 300km away (you can check that estimation also vs. the measured radiation data at the reactor and lets say yokohama, which is roughly a ratio of 1/10000, meaning that if it would be 1Sv at the reactor we would reach the level calculated) if the wind conditions are awful and a lot of fuel burns/evaporates.
When i heard the amount of fuel stored in their plant under the open air, and that the radiation prevented them from working, i decided to take the plane to okinawa from tokyo. If they manage to cool the fuel pool in reactor 4 reliably (which contains the more active rods), then i will fly back (about the rest, even about a meltdown in the containment i am less worried), but i am definitely not a fan of getting the yearly radiation dose for a nuclear plant worker within a week.
So, no, no need to panic, but on the other hand if this would be too long over Tokyo, we can get new reliable Data on cancer caused byt radiation (in a 35Mio population, you can pick up change in rates on the order of a percent easily).
As i said: i am no expert on this, and i lack the most important information (specific composition of the fuel rods). But since i lack it, i may be pessimistic.
Concerning standards: Well vcards work well (even on old smartphones), but the apple seems to have intentionally skipped this function. And when it still was done via IRDA it also took little connection time, bluetooth can be slow. Two Palms (or palms plus e.g. nokia 6310) were quite quick at exchanging vcards via infrared.
(Actually from the PIM viewpoint i loved the palm m105 more than most of the devices i have tested up to now: well readable in sunlight, ran of standard batteries/rechargables, long battery life)
If i dont want to be tracked, u turn it off. Easy enough.
If i turn it on, the next cell station knows where i am regardless if the phone is open source or not.
If i really need it and dont want to be tracked, then i use a sim card which does not require my name and a cheap used handset, bought with cash.
If i am really paranoid, i get the phone from a shop somewhere outside the country of use and only use data transfers with vpns.
So nothing of this has to do much with open source or not, even if i appreciate it. Even if i have an open source phone, if the manufacturer is evil, then he puts the tracker in the firmware.
So i prefer the off/unidentified mobile solution over any "open source snakeoil"
Did you actually read my comment? I will summarize it for you:
a) often you may need more math that you imaging, and sometime you *can* use math to solve a problem more efficient.
b) Understanding math well broadens the range of jobs you can take.
c) Some thing are just imposed by your university to test you.
And just tell to my CS friends who do work on image processing (pattern recognition), signal processing (e.g. channel separation), quantum computer architectures and memory hierarchies that they don't need math. They will be surprised.
But if you want to say that CS should be split into "applied CS" and "general CS", i agree.
Can you read: i don't say that the guy is wrong, i just say the way he is addressing the problem does not help the situation.
The style. He essentially does not ask: "What is wrong with gnome?" But he asks: "The world seems not like gnome, so what is wrong with the world?"
IMHO these are not good starting points. I don't say he is wrong, but lets say i think his ways of dealing tith the situation dont help to spread the gnome desktop.
and if that guy is characteristic for the gnome community, then i understand why people have problems with that community.
To those who find math in their studies unnecessary:
During my studies i always thought: I am never going to use this, this is way too theoretical. And i thought that for theoretical physics as well as for mathematics. The came the master thesis in experimental physics and i needed the biggest part of what i learned and more.
I cant promise this happens to you in the same way, but i can state the following: If you want to be a programmer then don't study CS, but program. The difference between computer science and programming is that i don't expect (he/she may very well be able to) a programmer to be able to design a protocol to handle sporadic loss of data, because, well for this you need math (stochastic/linear algebra). Calculus can be used at many places. One which comes to my mind is "find the minimum" in resource usage which may have a known scaling on a variable which (e.g. number of subdivisions you use in divide and conquer) you set different parts of you program. Yes, sure you can experimentally figure that out. But every programmer can do that, you don't need CS for it. But he may not be able to make a function which automatically determines some parameter according to an available resource.
The other question is: do you want to restrict yourself to programming only things which don't require calculus? So this mean you don't consider the many "embedded control loop" or "embedded signal processing" jobs worthy of being cherry-picked by you? You don't believe that e.g. integrating or transforming a sensor input and being able to talk to your customer (which may be a physicist working for a company to make a product ready) about it will affect your professional career? Processing numerical data is still quite some field which may enter you path in one way or the other.
Ultimately, and this may now be a little harsh: Some of the tests in the first semesters are cases of "real artists ship". Its irrelevant if you like it. Its irrelevant if you understood it by intelligence. Its irrelevant how much you to work for it. Just get it done. Unless you have an explicit legasteny for math, passing a test of the very elementary math you usually learn is not a matter of talent alone, but mainly a matter of preparation. Preparation includes the parts: learning (and a little understanding), training and being ready to take the test (which is many times the biggest problem). If you have problems with the latter, go to a counselor. In my experience students mainly fail in math because there is some kind of unrealistic expectation leading to a mental block (along the lines of "math just requires intelligence, so if i am bad at math then i am stupid and will never understand it and nothing i do will change it"). My experience show that people who address these blocks early and openly have a much easier time to study and succeed, even if they are not in top percentiles of intelligence or talent.
But they are so bad its already funny.
But I think "Firewall" was in the uncanny valley just before "ok lets forget the facts and get this part done quickly so we arrive st the explosions". I forgive a movie which displays a bad hackings scene as a plot element for 30 seconds. But holy crap, torturing my brain for minutes and minutes how to read information with scanner build from a fax modem from a monitor by scrolling trough a database?????
WTF?
No no.
My scientific estimation of monwy and time fusion:
x=durations of approved well funded projects by gov agencies last year
y=your current number of employed researchers.
z=money per y and researcher to make the researchers happy (including salary)
Apply for (mean(x)+p-std(x))*y*z
p is the political bonus.
The most accurate information you can get on earthquakes in Japan, listed by time and strength from hundreds (or thousands) of sensor station:
http://www.jma.go.jp/en/quake/
and tsunamis
http://www.jma.go.jp/en/tsunami/
I personally felt (400km away) the shock, two or three aftershocks and the nakano quake in the morning. Over this distance i would only feel a quake > 4 at the center (japanese scale).
at this place the primary shock was categorized to be 4 at my workplace which does not even make me get up from the chair (happens every few month), but i knew immediately that its big; the time between "the monitor shakes" and "the building shakes" gives you a rough estimation of the distance... and with that strength i knew it was > 6-7 (it felt more far away than the 7 nakano shock some time ago, and stronger).
No, i am safe (400km away) from all direct effects, but if the plant blows and the wind turns the story might be different. But ill now go and try to buy iodine tablets. I do not plan to move.
Since most foreign media just use NHK news, here is the link to their english website:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/index.html
I am in japan and following this very closely
Your comment is not even worth negative mod points.
a) define broken. Especially define then "not broken" and tell me about which review system you would not say that it is broken.
b) The "powerful cliques" are quite large for the more important Journals. PRL has 1000s of possible referees. I dont think they are good buddies with each other and converse about each paper.
c) As a scientist is don't know what consensus is. I just know how knowledge make the path from a freshly published article to small reviews to reviews of modern physics and then sometimes it was important enough and still not falsified after 50 years enters the textbooks. It would be very interesting to hear from you where a peer-reviewed topic "was wrong" on a significant scale.
And i would like to know when
I guess it would be quite cheap that the US navy upgrades some ship to be in front of the coast with strongly directed Antennas to pick up/transmit Wireless (WiMAX, if you like to have an polular standard) signals or provides a directed radio links which can provide infrastructure for mobile cell towers. Probably something like strongly directed GSM network cell would also be possible.
Electronic Warefare Troops can probably do similar things with analog radio since a long time.
However that wold make the participating as much as if they would drop weapons.
the music industry stops whining. Since a DRM-Free Music store (Ubuntu One) which is convenient to use exists well integrated on my favourite OS, i already buy songs for rougly $10 per month, that is, from the musicians i want to hear. From the unresanble labels i will still buy a CD. Why should I pay for the 10+ collections of some people who just download for downloadings sake.
Its like with the movies: please focus on your customers (like me, who spends easily $300 per year in the cinema and $200 per year for renting DVDs). Please continue to use that revenue to make more good movies.
We don't need a fee for a new type of public brodcasts.
oops. Wrong article.
Realtime tracking of most googled targets...
In Germany its a standard recommendation that if if the police catches you when speeding to ask for the calibration protocol of the device. There is a good chance you never will hear again from them.
And as a physicist: i agree. A meter which you have not calibrated and tested as prescribed in the instructions is worth nothing - there is no evidence that anybody was speeding; i would agree that he was speeding if the difference of measured vs allowed exceed the calibration range.
they even provide a mirror of the corresponding blender sources, so *legally* the are on the safe site, i guess.......:
http://www.illusionmage.com/source/blender-2.50a1.tar.gz